2012 Camping. Or not.

We'd started to plan our big summer excursion already, this time a "stay put trip" to counter the enjoyable but quite tiring "let's hitch up and move every two days" 2011 trip. We thought a couple of weeks at Virginia Beach (a relatively short hop) then home via the Shenandoah Valley. Campgrounds had been selected and routes pored over, but then came the double call from England; visit and be visited. It's a nice reason to have to shelve our summer plans but I'm still biting my lower lip a bit.

Virginia Beach

It started when my brother and his family said that they'd like to come over from the UK, something I'd been nagging him about for a while. They wanted early June and that was just great for us because that's still a few weeks away from the summer break. They will be present, too, for one of Mrs T's significant birthdays (no telegram from the Queen, yet), which is also good except that it means that Grandma T won't be able to visit on the occasion of said significant birthday (she's not sleeping in the Airstream, that's for sure!). Blood being thicker than water, the good Grandma proposed an alternative solution and that was for La Famille Crapaud  to hop over the pond (ribbit) for a couple of weeks of family liaison. So that's what we're doing, spending some quality time with the ancestors in July, and just avoiding the Olympics into the bargain. We're even flying into the old ancestral home, Exeter, so no slumming it up in That London for us.

Exeter

Of course, it'll be great to see Old Mother Toad, Grandma T, Grandad T, the sibling toads and spawn (and their spawn), and of course Les Amis de Crapaud, if we have the time; we're all quite excited about it. But our camping this summer is going to be curtailed somewhat and limited, largely, to weekends. I'm sure we'll get over it but until then, we'll just have to go and sit out in Towed Haul on the weekday evenings instead, especially as it's just lovely on our driveway!

Aeroplane

Oh, and I have no idea about the occasional lapses into French, except that I like the word crapaud a lot.