Water People

 In life you meet people that have their happy place. Often I find myself aghast when somebody tells me how they spent an entire weekend preparing a curry. Hand crushing the herbs, marinating and finding their own personal zen. Alternatively, they may say that after a hard day in the office they go straight into the garden and love to feel the mud between their toes . All of that leaves me utterly cold. I just don't understand that at all.

HOWEVER, put me near any body of water and I am happy. That could be the sea, a stream or even a paddling pool. I would even go so far as to say a puddle, but given the amount of rain in the last 8 months I will hold off from that for now.

Last weekend was fathers day, but as my Dad is in his late 80's and it was his birthday as well as fathers day - the day was all about him. So this Sunday was husband's day. We did fathers day all over again, but it was all about husband.

I made him a sausage and bacon bap for breakfast and did his Sunday morning kitchen clean up so that he could watch the football. Then around 11:30 we headed off to Barcombe. A bit of internet searching last week had identified the Anchor pub. A pub by the River Ouse that rented out boats (should we wish to). 

We went to Barcome a while back because it was recommended as a good inland spot for paddle boarding and kayaking. We did find a lovely spot, but you couldn't travel far because of low bridges and pipes. Part of our visit to the Anchor was to see if it was a better area to go out on the water. 

It definitely was, but it's hard to work out where you could park to get into the water. Because the pub rents out boats it's not keen for people to bring their own water equipment. I get that. The only problem is finding a way to get down to the water with somewhere to park. We'll definitely give it a go if the weather settles down.

The journey to the Anchor is down a one track road - it really is in the middle of nowhere. I expected it to be empty when we arrived, but it was absolutely packed with families who had had the same idea.

At the pub we had a Sunday lunch by the waterside. They did Sunday lunches, but to be honest (and I'm not blowing my own trumpet here) whenever we have a British Sunday Lunch that's not home cooked it's always disappointing. No matter how good the reviews are. So son continued his mission to eat a burger in every place in the world, husband had fish and chips and I had a Ploughmans. I haven't had a Ploughmans for about 10 years. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm thinking of adding it to our recipe list for our holiday.

After the lunch we went for a wander along the river to try to find a good place to park. We weren't very successful with that. It seems the only place to park is the pub. Whilst I get that they don't want people taking their own kit - it does feel like we may need to break the rules and suffer the consequence's.  I am also interested in hiring one of their rowing boats. I recall many happy times in my teens and twenties hiring boats and going down the River Wey. 

Back then we had canoe's and I'd love to paddle gently upstream and then turn around and lie back looking at the clouds as the water gently took me back to where I'd left my stuff on the river bank. Ahhh simpler times.

The journey back from the Anchor was not as easy. We'd headed to the pub early because you can't book tables, so when we headed back we hit a mad rush of people trying to get to the pub. I mentioned it was a single track road. For about 30 minutes we were in a situation where cars were having to reverse back to let other cars through. At one point husband had to reverse back about 300m. In the end we managed to catchup with a convoy of cars pushing forward. We stuck with them because we seemed to win the road because of the number of cards. Still it took us about 30 minutes to drive about half a mile because of the chaos.

I will admit it does put us off a return visit a bit. But it's such a good spot for water sport we'll just have to see what the future holds.