The Great Outdoors!

As of my post about nostalgia and spending time with the fresh air - I've spent a lot of the last two weekends immersing myself in the great outdoors and spending time with family.

Whenever I was stuck in London I would always long for the fantastic countryside of the Island, but now I'm here for a bit I never take advantage of it!

Last week I went to The Needles with my Mum, Step Dad and little bro. Most people who have come to the Isle of Wight know about the Needles. It's some pretty pointy rocks off the coast, and is one of the 7 wonders of the Isle of Wight...

We took the chairlift down to the beach and had a walk along the front, the different coloured chalks is one of the attractions of the area. Up top in the park you can put the coloured sands into a funny shaped container - I'm pretty sure every Islander has one of these, mine is an elephant.




Halfway going up the chairlift my Mum decided to see how secure the bar holding us in was and tried to lift it up - turns out it really wasn't secure as we could've easily fallen out! The coloured sand really is incredible and the views down there are fantastic! They were having a bit of an offer which gave you all a free ride on the chairlift but it's always great fun there! They also have a cafe, and a sweet and glass making demonstration which is so fascinating, and you get to try the sweets which is always a winner ;)

Good Friday was an absolutely b-e-a-utiful day. So imagine how unhappy I was that everyone was off enjoying the bank holiday weather whilst I was at work! So when I got off work early, I thought I should make the most of it. So much of the time I sit mulling around home moaning about being bored or the rubbish weather, and just thought that this was too good an oppurtunity to miss! So I drove over to my favourite place (which apparently half the Island thought they would too, finding a parking space which was suitable for my lack of parking skills took almost half an hour...) 



Finally, for Easter Sunday I woke up to some abysmal weather. Chucking it down with rain, predicted thunderstorms (I'm scared of lightning as well) so the prospect of spending the morning at an outdoor duck race wasn't particularly appealing... but hey, I love getting a bit muddy!
 First off we went over to a lovely place called Winkle Street for the traditional Duck Race on a really muddy bank! Went for a paddle in the stream and watched about 1000 ducks make their way down the river until the end, unluckily (but not unsurprisingly) I didn't win but it was great fun once the rain stopped! We had a lovely walk across Freshwater Bay, it was so windy! We then headed to an Easter Egg hunt at Mottistone Gardens. Now for you Cumberpatch fans, this is where he got married! They have a Sherlock Holmes scarecrow and this cute little flower pot man which has a little Benedict Cumberpatch plaque underneath it. So cute! It's also such a lovely place to get married, the gardens are so well looked after and from the top of the hill you can see the sea! There's a cute little tea gardens where we got some amazing cakes and scones, and so many beautiful flowers growing! Lastly, and most spectacularly we went to see the rough waves at Brook beach. This was soooo beautiful I feel like no pictures will ever do it justice, but my GoPro does a pretty good job at trying! The waves were so rough and you can see me trying to run away from them in the bottom right - I managed to avoid getting wet!