So you’ve heard all about the new palatial tent, somewhere fitting to pitch it was obviously required.
With time being against us we needed a fairly local campsite, I must also confess to being a bit of a camping snob and so for me it is essential that a site is abundant with immaculate, clean and shiny toilet and shower blocks…anything else goes but that’s my deal breaker!
A favourite campsite of ours fits the bill perfectly, located about an hours drive away (are we nearly there yet?), with plentiful clean toilet blocks and large enough to accommodate our late booking to boot.
The campsite at Sandringham is set in the heart of the Sandringham estate, yep the Norfolk retreat of our dear HRH. The estate itself is beautiful, I always love camping in a forest and only a short drive away from the Norfolk Coast. With its royal connections camping here always feels quite decadent, a bit like camping in the Queen’s garden, the estate is free to roam and there are plenty of forest trails to get lost on explore.
With the tent pitched and the sunny weather still in full swing we headed to the beach.

We were even organised enough to remember a bucket and spade!

In the evening we headed back to the forest, wearing the children out on a fantastic play park and waiting for nightfall…We had exciting plans!

So what were we doing parking at the edge of the forest in total darkness?

I’m pretty sure the children were asking the same question.
Well we were there to find a geocache, more importantly a night cache. This time the GPS coordinates we were given didn’t lead us to the treasure, simply to roadside parking. Then the fun was to begin. The kids were a bit nervous, but a few minutes in were having a whale of a time.
We were given clear instructions to hold torches at eye level and walk into the forest, once in the forest we had to look for a series of reflective markers, we scouted around and soon spotted the first of the white markers, the trail of markers leads you deeper and deeper into the forest, twisting and turning through the forest, how much fun? We tripped over roots, we stumbled into brambles, we were scared of noises and shouted out ‘where on earth is the next marker?’, soon enough though we started to find red markers (a bit creepier…is that a marker or a wild beast?…) which meant we were closer to the cache, then hurrah! green markers. This meant we were in the zone for finding the cache, we were instructed to stand in a spot where the reflectors lined up, we reached out and bingo, there was the cache nestled in a branch.
Who knew it could be so exciting finding an old, recycled, camouflaged bottle. As a nice touch as well as the log book to sign in the cache there was a haul of glow sticks for the kids to take for the walk back to the car.

Now, which way was that last turn?…….