Every British person knows when its a Bank Holiday weekend. Not by looking at the calendar like most other nationalities, but by the fact that it starts chucking it down with rain and you look at the weather forecast and can see nothing but rain for days to come! Welcome to Easter weekend 2018.

Welcome to Start Bay Caravan Club site for Easter 2018!!

Last Easter we were in Greece with a clear blue sky and every family in the village seemed to roast a whole lamb, on a spit, over hot coals, outside. The only way anyone’s going to be barbecuing this Easter around here is in full waterproofs!

The Swan Inn turned out to be a basic English pub with good beer and cider and with solid, maybe even stolid, but unremarkable food. There were few diners but surprisingly five German women who seemed to have an excellent grasp of English, but when it came to confirming to mein host that their sea bass was “delicious” I think that their appreciation of the English custom of praising the most mediocre food when asked “how was it”, was even better than their language skills!

The village car park turned out to be very peaceful and nobody arrived in the morning to collect money, so we had a free night. We were somewhat entertained by the arrival of a horse in a horse box, which the driver proceeded mount and ride into the countryside. She returned, put the horse into its accommodation, drove off and then about 30 minutes later returned with a different horse and repeated the procedure.

The rest of the day was spent on a longish drive round the coast to the Start Bay Caravan Club site near Slapton, just south of Dartmoor. The first part of our journey was on a road above the seas which would have yielded spectacular coastal views, were it not for the torrential rain. We tried, on three separate occasion, to fill Basil with LPG, but each of the garages had run out. I have read on a few forums about an LPG shortage in the South West, but if it doesn’t improve after this weekend we might be forced to abandon the Devon/Cornwall peninsular in order to stock up.

Because we feared that all the sites would be fully booked over Easter we reserved a place at Start Bay more than a week ago, for four nights. It turns out we needn’t have bothered: the site has had over 20 cancellations for this weekend and it is barely half full tonight. Not a good start for the tourist industry who rely on Easter as the beginning of their season.

We are only about three quarters of a mile from the sea here and so I thought it would be a nice place to spend Easter, but unless the forecast is wrong or improves I think we could be reading a book or two and watching a few movies.