The weather was a bit poor, but our week under canvas still had plenty of highlights. For a start there was the campsite itself.

The showers and toilets were quite civilised and there was even a bath. We only have a shower at home so I enjoyed the novelty of lounging in a bath one evening. The shop was well-stocked and open all day every day, and a couple of local businesses came along with food vans and parked up near the play area in the evenings.

The fields are right on a cliff edge and there is a path going down to a private (stony) beach. You can cross the chine by a footbridge and go up to the cliffs opposite to join the coastal path and enjoy some excellent views. Not much good when its pissing down and blowing up a gale, but in normal circumstances this would be a great location.

The site itself is based on a farm and there is a herd of goats, a couple of pigs, some llamas, chickens, geese, turkeys, horses and a water buffalo all knocking around. The kids were always willing to go off to do the washing up as we supplied them them with plenty of leftover fruit, veg and bread to feed the animals afterwards.

We had expected to spend a lot of time lazing around the site and on the beach, but it was a bit chilly and damp for that so we went out a lot. The first day we went to Brading, where everyone thoroughly enjoyed the Wax Museum. I was a bit miffed that I left my camera back at the tent but didn’t let that ruin my day.

On Tuesday we went to Blackgang Chine. It has expanded quite a bit since I was last there (at least 30 years ago) and now has a roller coaster and water slide but there was plenty there I remembered – the dinosaur models, the whale skeleton, the lifeboat exhibition.

Its a strange place as it is still family-owned and has a bit more character than Thorpe Park, Chessington and similar places. It is more basic with fewer rides but more attractions, some of which are endearingly old-fashioned. The park is built on the edge of an eroding chine, but it has been expanding inland quite a bit.

The entry ticket allows you to go back once within 7 days so we kept that in reserve for a cheap day out later in the week.

Actually what we did was left the kids there for a couple of hours to exercise their independence on Saturday while we went off in search of a cream tea.

On Wednesday we went to Carisbrooke Castle, just a few minutes up the road. Not that anywhere is very far from anywhere else on the Island: it is not a huge place.

I like this castle. I still have the same attitude I had as a child and I’m always a bit disappointed when a castle turns out to be just a pile of stone with lots of pictures showing where the walls used to be, or when it is really just a slightly fortified stately home

Despite being 900 years old in parts, Carisbrooke has its walls intact so you can walk around them, and climb the 70+ stairs up to the keep. They also still keep donkeys to raise water from the well.

We visited just in time, as the wind started to pick up by the time we had gone all round the ramparts. When I got to the keep it did feel a bit precarious and I was glad to get down again. By the time we did all the indoors bits it really was getting gale force so we did it all in the right order, but it was a scary night back at the tent with the walls blowing inwards.

We stayed quite local on Thursday. I explored the local village a bit and went up on the cliffs and later on we took a walk on the beach and, despite the presence of a seal carcass washed up there, the kids went for a swim.

On Friday we went up to Yarmouth, watched the boats for a while, got ripped-off for breakfast at the Mariners Cafe (not bad, but very over-priced for what it was) and failed to visit the castle because it is closed on Fridays and Saturdays. Charlie was disappointed, but it didn’t look like much of a castle really.

After Yarmouth we went round to the Needles. This is described as a theme park but really its like a land-based pier. We had been looking forward to taking the chairlift down to the base of the cliffs but when we arrived it was closed due to high winds.

After we had done the tourist thing of filling up glass ornaments with coloured sands, the wind had dropped a bit and the ride started up again so we got to ride down the cliff. It was still a bit blowy, but not too bad.

On Saturday we started by going back to Brading to visit the roman villa at Charlie’s request. He is very interested in history. Jayne and Chrystal are as well, but Chas is a bit more obsessed. The villa is in a new building, only a few years old, and a remarkable bit of award-winning architecture. To be honest I found the new building more impressive than the villa it was built to contain. Like most roman villas its just a few mosaics, an indication of where the walls were and a lot of imagination.

Our national inclination with antiquities is to preserve them, but I sometimes wish we were more inclined to restore and renovate. Even cleaning and touching up the colour on the mosaics and replacing the missing bits would be a start. I would be fascinated to see a proper villa with walls and roofs, even if it was not all original. This approach works well on the HMS Victory but doesn’t get tried enough on buildings.

After the villa we dropped the kids off at Blackgang Chine and headed for Godshill village. Godshill is popular because it is pretty, although the popularity makes it less pretty as every other building is a tea room or shop, but I guess that is unavoidable. There are still a few ‘unspoilt’ villages on the island where you can look at thatched cottages and churches, but none of them has a model village like Godshill does.

The model village is a fairly accurate miniature of the real Godshill – as it was before it got taken over by commercialism. It is so accurate that the model village contains a model of the model village. And that model is accurate enough to contain its own model of the model village. I don’t know if it gets any more recursive than that as I didn’t take a magnifying glass with me.

After seeing all those tilt-shift photos on Flickr where photos of real places are made to look like models it was fun trying to take photos of a model to try and make it look like a real place. On the way back to the campsite we remembered to pick up the kids and enjoyed an evening playing cards while the wind and rain came back in force, trying not to think of how we would get the tent down in such weather.

When Sunday morning came it was calm and dry so we got everything together a lot more quickly than we expected, and got up to Ryde with loads of time to spare so we had a look in the town before going to the ferry terminal and had a breakfast twice as good as in Yarmouth and at half the price and still managed to get onto the ferry before the one we were booked on.

Quite a packed week, but we still didn’t see half of what is on the island and will have to return at some point in the future and hopefully with better weather, or in a cottage instead of a tent. The wind and rain did get us a bit down, but we kept telling ourselves that we were still more comfortable than a lot of people in Gloucester, Tewkesbury and other flooded areas.