Thursday 28 August 2014

A Campervan adventure part one

With summer coming to an end we've been thinking about preparing Grizzy for his autumn and winter hibernation probably sometime in October. With this in mind I thought I'd share a couple of adventures we've had in him so far. Adventures that have opened my eye to experiences that I'm not sure I want to repeat!

Every Friday night we take Grizzy, park along the seafront, eat our dinner and get an ice cream. This particular evening I thought we should go to a local beauty spot for a change of scenery. "it will be lovely" I said "the scenery is amazing" I said "we can watch the sun setting" I said, "it will be so peaceful" I said

We drove up to Devils Dyke and yes it was lovely and yes the sun was setting


The scenery is amazing







But is it peaceful? Well no not really mainly due to the abundance of cars with lone males pulling into the car park. That's right I had inadvertently taken Mark to the local dogging hotspot!!

At first I didn't know what was going until it twigged that the men were on their own and weren't there to walk their dogs. Everytime they pulled into the car park they took one look at us and Grizzy, turned round and drove straight back out.
Was it the fact that we were sitting there eating a picnic?


Or the fact that Mark was busy sprucing Grizzy up and giving him a wax (not a euphemism)



After an hour we decided to make a move as I was getting a bit freaked out.  So making Mark lock the doors we drove out being careful not to flash our headlights, one for yes, two for no!!


I was both outraged and fascinated on our way home (I hasten to add we didn't see any action). I honestly thought dogging was an urban myth so I made my mind up to ring the local constabulary the next morning just to see if we were completely barking up the wrong tree. Thankfully I had the sense to actually Google it rather than ringing the police station (how embarrassing would that have been, appalled from Brighton ringing up to see if the Devils Dyke really was a hotbed of dogging!) and it turns out there's a rather large dogging community around Sussex beauty spots.  It was very easy to find out where to go, I didn't need to create a login for any of the sites,  I could just trawl the forums and find out everything I ever needed to know and much more I didn't.

Apparently Devils Dyke isn't what it used to be.  It tends to be only lone men who go up there and ever since they found the dead body (yes really!) people haven't been enjoying the 'sights' as much. Much better to go somewhere else.

So there you go, a brand new experience courtesy of Grizzy and one that I never imagined experiencing.  The whole point of getting Grizzy was to experience new things, I just didn't reaslise our first experience would be of the dogging variety!

For anyone interested in learning more about the wonders of dogging I highly recommend you watch this youtube clip of Fascinating Aida!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXzaVOk_Ydk