Julie's Boggle

Tom’s recently confirmed another trip to New York for work. Apparently they want him to go there about four times a year.

In theory, it’s a good thing, because he’s earning more AA airmiles with every trip, and hopefully soon that will turn into a free ticket and another trip for me. But in the meanwhile, I’m going to lose him for a whole week in April – and leaving on my birthday too!

Fortunately we have the Easter long weekend together, because the next week he’s off again for work, this time to a developer conference in Oxford for several days. At least we’ll be sharing the same time zone for that trip! (Amusingly, Tom – who’s not usually one for writing long letters home while he’s away – is going to have to write up a daily blog for work on the conference goings-on.)

Last weekend we headed for the south coast, just past Chichester. To the small seaside village of Bracklesham Bay and the holiday resort of “South Downs”.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we were going down for an Alpha weekend, hosted by Holy Trinity Brompton. As HTB is where Alpha got started, I guess that made our weekend about as authentic an Alpha weekend as you can get!

There were quite a few other churches along, taking attendance to several hundred, and even with the large numbers, the organisation was impeccable.

The resort itself was quite novel to us, having missed out on the whole UK holiday resort culture. This one had moved with the times but we fall well outside of their target market judging by their website:
– “Over 50′s chalet Hotel Breaks…”

It was a big place but HTB had the entire site booked — a good thing because there were lots of little kids running around and usually the resort is “adults only”!

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My weekend was certainly very relaxing. During the morning sessions on Saturday, I wandered off on a nice long walk. The pebbled beach of Bracklesham Bay was only a few minutes away. And from there I rambled off in a westerly direction.

People may say that you have to have sand to make it a proper beach, but I do like a good solid shore of pebbles. The rattling, crashing rumble of a billion pebbles as the breakers rush back away from the shore is awesome.The pebbles become sand further down, and then eventually the shoreline dissolves into a great marsh – a lovely wild area. And speculated as the location where the Romans first landed in Britain!

I rejoined the group for lunch (they did feed us well!), and then we had the afternoon free so we took a carload to nearby Chichester.

More a town than a city, Chichester’s main points of interest are its large cathedral and the well-preserved Roman walls which enclose the central area and make for a pleasant walk.

To wrap up the day, we had some excellent entertainment in the evening back at the resort. Performances were by various people, and the whole show was compèred by one of the HTB clergy – who, I’m sure, could easily bring in some extra cash on the comedy circuit if his day job doesn’t pay well enough! He had us in stitches.

Not sure if it was all the walking, but I completely got over all the little botherations of the night before (tiny bed which had Tom and I on top of each other most of the night, plus loud rushing water noises from the radiator every 10 minutes) and slept like a log.

I spent most of the Sunday morning program with the others. And next thing it was lunch, and then we were packing up and heading back for London.

All in all a fine time out from our busy schedules and a great opportunity to recharge the mental batteries.