North Norfolk in the storm

As an escape and in place of the much preferred trip to the sun by plane, we booked a week in a cottage in North Norfolk - Hunstanton to be precise. It is locally known as "Sunny Hunny" only in early December that is not a good moniker. Especially when one of the winter storms comes through and you get sand-blasted on the beach.

However, a great time was had by one and all. The one being Izzy the doglet who had such fun on the huge empty sandy beaches and in the forests that she needed a bath:

That look says it all but she is very good and just stands there whilst the indignity continues. You can get an idea of the windy conditions at the tail end of the storm from this little video clip:

and how little it upset the compulsory digging from this clip:

This was the stunningly beautiful beach near Wells-on-sea, known as the Holkham beach. After some serious ball fun we all needed refreshment. There was a most impressive bar for Izzy:

she sniffed at the Carlsbark and licked up some Pawroni.

The only drawback to the week was the total lack of decent coffee from the dog friendly cafes along the coast. It is sad when you walk past a Costa and think "one of those would be nice". For such a busy touristy area with some very posh places like Burnham Market, we expected way better. However, the Rose and Crown pub in Snettisham made up for that by dishing out some stunningly good food. A must visit when in the area. At least the beaches were pretty empty:

Hunstanton itself is a stony area, not that it put off the little dog. The temperature was less than inviting for humans as you can guess from the attire:

but that was an excuse for poor coffee and cake afterwards. The return to Penarth was via a stop off in Toft Monks (look it up!) to catch up with Ian and Mary after a walk around Wittlingham country park. This was the first time we'd seen their lovely new house and Izzy disgraced herself, eating a huge amount of their dog Paddy's chew bone. It contained some peanut extracts and the resulting poo was "interesting" in the extreme. Most colourful.

Maintenance news:

When we got back to the boat we were greeted by another little opportunity. The voltage gauge for the air conditioning system had decided to give up:

We knew it was getting sickly as the "off" voltage was showing around 11v rather than zero and it was starting to run warm. The normal failure mode is for the reading to fluctuate and then the gauge can perhaps be rescued by replacing the big smoothing capacitor in it. Sadly this one was a terminal failure but luckily the Nordhavn Europe folks had one of these in stock that we could collect on our upcoming trip to Hythe. This sickly one was unplugged to prevent any serious overheating.