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We are heading out to Australia and New Zealand for the month of October, leaving the cats in the capable hands of 3 house sitters. The trip will be a combination of visiting friends, visiting vineyards and wineries, and taking part in orienteering events – including the World Masters Orienteering Championships in Sydney and the Blue Mountains. We have been training for the trip – one of us more energetically than the other!This was the Jurassic Coast 10k run! & I run a Wine Appreciation group!

We have an apartment in the village of La Clusaz in the Haute Savoie. This is a lovely corner of France – we go there in winter for skiing and in summer for walking and climbing. We spent a few days there in September  and did a good climb onthe mountain of La Tournette (between Annecy and Thones)                                                                               

Had a very changeable summer here weather-wise, so we haven’t been on the beach as much as I thought we would. But we’ve enjoyed having lots of visitors and exploring the area around with them. Dartmoor is a real wilderness of course, but we are exploring it , climbing the tors and finding out about the archaeology. And then there’s the coastal path…. We’ve done various trips on boats, been to local vineyards, watched cricket, gorged on music concerts, seen otters, and collected fossils.

On Hound Tor

Fishing off Budleigh beach 

With friends on the coastal path

Playing in the recorder group

Well, the kitchen is now finished, and we had a kitchen-warming party to celebrate – a good way to get to know our new neighbours better. Here it is:

It’s a great joy to use, with plenty of cupboards. There’s also a walk-in larder leading off the kitchen which is home to the freezer, groceries and wine (even a dedicated fridge for the white wine!).

We decided to modernise the kitchen. First we created a walk-in larder out of what used to be a downstairs bathroom. This involved re-routing the central heating pipes, then knocking a gap through a thick wall for the doorway – very messy!

Then, having stripped nearly all the fittings from the old kitchen we were left for two weeks with nothing but an oven! Someone came and put a new floor down, but still no units arrived…….

This is what the kitchen looked like before we started:

And this was the state of things as the door was being knocked through for the larder:

Finally the oven in solitary splendour:

The good news is that the new units have now arrived and ‘Kevin’ and ‘Phil’ are putting them in. Hope to have a picture of a lovely new kitchen  – maybe next week?

Up on the common is a prehistoric earthwork called Woodbury Castle – a well preserved ‘camp’ in a wooded area protected by concentric ditches. Rather similar to Loughton Camp or Amesbury Banks in Epping Forest, but the banks here are much higher, probably because they are made out of the ‘pebblebed’ bit of the geological sequence.

A little way inland (but still within easy walking distance of the house) is Woodbury Common, an extensive area of heathland with bits of woodland. Great for walking and orienteering (if you can avoid the boggy bits and the gorse, not to mention commandos on training exercises!). The OS map is badly out of date, but we’ve got the orienteering maps of the common which are very easy to use.

The River Otter flows into the sea at the eastern end of Budleigh beach. There’s a lovely walk up the river and it’s an ideal spot for birdwatchers. One evening around dusk we watched an enormous flock of starlings wheeling and turning  like a pulsating cloud as they played before bedtime.

 The beach itself is stony- the stones apparently come from ancient rocks in Brittany which got eroded by some ancient huge river. There’s usually someone fishing off the beach – it’s a good spot for mackerel and John sees himself catching the family supper in future!

We are enjoying the coast and countryside around here. Two minutes from the house is the South West Coastal path – which runs all round the coast of Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. It’s an exhilarating walk along the Jurassic coast. This pic is taken from the path looking east towards the beach at Budleigh. The headland in the middle is where the River Otter enters the sea, and in the far distance you can see the coast sweeping round Lyme Bay towards Chesil beach.