Escape to Lyme Regis

As the weather was so glorious last week we decided to go and spend as much time in it as we could, and go camping by the sea.  We closed our eyes, pointed at the map and set off for Lyme Regis in Dorset.

We left just after the home-time rush and arrived in good time to set up camp and still have time to watch the sunset with a glass of cider.  (It wasn't quite as warm in the evenings as it was during the day!)

Next morning we followed the meandering footpath along the river into town and spent the day rummaging about in Lyme Regis.

It is such a cute little town, full of wonky houses painted in bonbon colours, nice rummage-y sort of shops and endless ice creams.

We spent quite a long time sitting in the sunshine consuming said ice creams and marvelling at the fabulous weather.

The next day we were hoping to follow the South West Coast Path along to Golden Cap, but by the time we had negotiated two diversions (due to a large portion of the path having fallen in the sea over the winter), we ran out of time and energy and stopped in Charmouth for a blisteringly hot afternoon rummaging for fossils.

We managed to forget our swimmers so had to content ourselves with a bit of paddling.

The second green blob of cliff is where we hoped to reach...we made it a disappointingly short way!

Despite not having reached our intended destination, we did do rather a lot of walking and arrived back to camp later and tired-er than expected...

...so we shuffled back into Lyme Regis and stuffed enormous greasy takeaway on the beach.  It was delicious!

We decided the next day to venture slightly further afield and went along the coast to Chesil Beach.  It is utterly stunning, miles and miles of smooth round pebbles all heaped in a big bank, as if the sea is collecting them from around the world and putting them carefully in one place.

You can't swim off the beach as it drops down very quickly into deep water with strong currents, but there are millions of smooth flat stones and a great canvas of smooth flat sea perfect for hours of skipping pebbles.

We dragged ourselves away and drove over to the Isle of Portland.

We climbed up from the village to the War Memorial and fabulous views of Chesil Beach stretching away to the horizon.

A little further along the road is Tout Quarry, a Nature Reserve and Sculpture Park.  It's quite an unusual place to walk through as it looks so wild and rugged but is completely man made, but as it's in a sort of bowl you feel like you have been transported to end of the Earth.  It's filled with huge piles of stone, banks of stone chips and cliffs made of fossilised swamps, the whole lot rambling with wild flowers.

As you wander along (feeling a bit like you've been whisked to the wild west) you notice an oddly shaped rock and suddenly a shape appears and you notice a sculpture in the stone.

This then unleashed a tiny bit of inner five year old and we wandered round trying to spot all the sculptures.

The neat walls and tunnels cutting through the quarry make a beautiful contrast to the wild abandon surrounding them.

The rambling paths brought us out for one last glorious view before we had to trundle back down the hill for sensible things like lunch and going home.

There couldn't have been a more perfect end to our escape-y weekend!