Fun in the forest...

After a less than pleasant end to my working week last week, it was good to hop in the car in the early hours of Friday morning to collect Mum and clear off down to the south coast for the weekend to visit Little Sis & family.

The primary reason was to surprise my little niece by meeting her from school on her birthday which I'm pleased to report went pretty much to plan. As a bonus, we also got to collect her little brother from nursery which was a (hopefully nice) surprise for him too.

Despite all the parties and other pre-planned activities I think the event that amused us all most was during an impromptu trip to the New Forest. They are very fortunate to live a short drive away from such a beautiful area and it proved the perfect venue for a last minute "KFC picnic" yesterday afternoon. I'll skip the various attempts required to get the moronic youth behind the counter to understand our basic order but eventually, we piled the food and drink in the back of the camper van and headed off for Lyndhurst.

Zinger Tower Burgers, Fries and Popcorn Chicken may not be traditional picnic fare, but they served their purpose of leaving us all feeling too full to walk very far although we had been looking forward to taking a wander in search of some New Forest ponies (which are seldom too far away). As luck would have it, three of them wandered right up to where we had parked the van and one of them stopped to see what we were up to.

In fact, he decided to inspect the van at such close quarters that we began to wonder whether he would actually get in! Incidentally, I say "he" as at one point he proved the matter beyond doubt.


(Apologies for picture quality - I'm still trying to work out all of the features on the new mobile)

After a brief snack on a discarded french fry, a plastic beaker, a loose curtain and my brother in-law's arm, he eventually moved far enough back for us to push our way past and close the door.

Well, there's something you don't get to see every day...