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We're doing Center Parcs again, though I am not sure why. It's fun, but only in the way that nightmares are fun, usually when you wake up and realise they're over and didn't really happen. Also it's a nightmare where you have to pay a huge amount of money up front but are then still charged for everything that happens to you, even if it's just using a hair dryer.
Anyway, so we could get every single possible second of the living Hell we travelled nearly all the way there today so we can be first through the gates of Hades tomorrow. I was feeling better after eleven hours of sleep, but not completely back to full health and was weary after two hours of driving, so Catie took over. Just, as we hit difficult traffic.
After five hours we found ourselves in Frome. Which is lucky as that's where our hotel was. My satnav has broken down (this time not my fault) and is currently in Romania being fixed. I didn't think it mattered as everyone knows that all roads read to Frome (that's this year's proper joke, so please enjoy it), but that turned out not to be true (also not true of Rome btw). We had to use a combination of phones and the shitty sat nav that comes with the VW Sharan (which is about as good as guessing which turn you need to take). Plus it was market day in Frome so it was a somewhat fractious misadventure getting to the centre of town, but we saw quite a bit of Frome on the way.
We had the family room in our hotel which was two singles and a double bed crammed into a somewhat dilapidated space, up three flights of stairs in a pub, right above the kitchen so it smelled of Sunday roasts. But it was a fun adventure and the kids leapt from bed to bed and played games to win the complimentary biscuits.
They are at a really great age now where we're spending more time laughing than crying (at least whilst they're still awake) and they've come up with an impro game where they lift their foot to their ear (oh to be that limber) and pretend they're making a phone call, which we then have to answer. At dinner Ernie rang me up wanting to sell his uneaten (and rather dry and wrinkly) peas to me for a pound a pea. I said that was too much and he suggested 50p a pea, but I not unreasonably said the most I'd pay him foe one pea was 1p. He managed to talk me up to 5p for a pea so I took one of his peas and then counted out five of his peas and handed them back to him. He was absolutely peeing himself over this bit of business. Phoebe did some similar silliness with her mum and laughed as hard as I've ever seen her laughing. These kids aren't pushovers when it comes to comedy (all right, maybe Ernie a bit, the pea/p/pee dynamic has been well-explored before) so it's so joyous to see them totally lose it. Usually we're a bit too conscious of other people in a public space, but this felt enclosed enough and not too loud. But who cares if anyone judged us. This is the golden time.
My mild lurgy meant I was wiped out again by bed time, but the enclosed space with no escape also meant that my snoring was a problem for everyone else. Ernie slept through, but the others were not so lucky. Being in a family is a see-saw of joy and sorrow.
