I sent my roving report, Bee, off to the Harry Potter Studio Tour. Here’s how she got on.

Harry Potter Studio Tour

The other day I went on my third visit to Warner Bros Studio Tour. You would have thought that the excitement would have died down a bit seeing as I had already been round the thing twice. But no. I was ecstatic. The whole way round.

After a rocky start to the afternoon, where I lost my bank card on the London Midlands train, we arrived only half an hour late, but nothing had really started yet. We were given a lanyard, which put us at VIP status, and a token for butterbeer, which I was super excited about because it’s actually delicious.

Then the tour started. We entered the great hall and it was as magical as it always is. It’s really surreal actually being somewhere that you’ve seen on movies time and time again. But we weren’t just there for the lols! Oh no! We were there to celebrate the new Sweets and Treats campaign, featuring an inside look into how they created all those amazing food based props for the Harry Potter series. View Post

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I’ve only ever been to Edinburgh once, and I feel bad about it. I have some American friends, and when they are in the UK, a day trip for them is to Paris or Berlin – how can I have lived in the UK all this time and only ever made it as far as Scotland once?

It’s extra shameful as it’s so easy to get to – we’re less than an hour from Bristol airport and you can fly right into the city in only about 90 minutes. Accommodation doesn’t have to be pricey either; Edinburgh’s Holiday Inn for example offers great value, especially for families, and is handily placed between the airport and city centre – ideal for your Edinburgh mini-break.

I will have to go again at some point within the next few years, as ‘tell a joke at the Edinburgh festival’ is on my list of 40 things to do before I’m 40, but in the meantime, here’s a teaser of some of the fun things that are going down in Edinburgh this July: View Post

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When I say ‘honeymooning with children’, I do mean your own children. I’m not suggesting you turn your honeymoon into some sort of subsidised summer camp, as that would be weird.

I am planning a wedding at the moment, (did I mention it? Just once or twice?), and one of the things I’m most excited about is the honeymoon. I can safely say that I will not be honeymooning with my children, as lovely as they are, but from talking to other married couples, honeymooning with children is a lot more popular than I realised. It could be a childcare issue, or perhaps financial – it may be the only holiday you can afford and you feel bad leaving the children out. I’ve even heard a rumour that some people just actively choose to take their children on honeymoon because they want them there!

Who’d have thought it?

It might be that you can’t help but take your baby, but I don’t think this is so much of a problem as childcare really isn’t an issue here:

honeymoons with children View Post

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Today’s post is from my fiancé, and is a follow up to his recent post where he looked forward to his first festival experience.

Wychwood festival

I’m writing this a couple of weeks after my first festival experience.

Hard to believe, isn’t it, that someone who works in music and likes to believe he has notes, harmony and stave lines pouring through his veins could possibly have gone 35 years without ever spending a few nights of mild discomfort and cold in a field in the name of the art form which I’m most passionate about? View Post

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Last weekend I took Belle and my fiancé* off to Wychwood Festival.

It was his very first ever festival experience and we set off with a mixture of excitement and nervousness – he wasn’t sure how he was going to cope with the camping, festival fashions, or the dancing requirements and I was slightly concerned about the weather forecast for torrential rain and 40mph gales. Fortunately he needn’t have worried.

“I was anxious about not being a very good dancer,” he told me afterwards, “but then we got there and I realised no one was.”

Well quite. If there’s one situation in which you really don’t have to worry about looking silly, it’s at a festival.

We got off lightly on the weather front too. There was a slighty soggy moment on the Sunday morning, just as we were trying to pack up our tents, but apart from that the rain restricted itself to when we were asleep. Good job too, as I had made the brave decision not to take wellies, and didn’t want to look foolish.

Wychwood Festival review

Making the most of the little bit of sunshine to show off my new Joe Brown’s dress.

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Having shared my own thoughts on The Point at Polzeath last week, you can now read my fiancé’s version of events.

Golf at The Point at Polzeath

I’m rather wary of coming across as smug at the moment.

There is nothing worse than watching couples on social media gloating about how chuffed they are with their relationship, especially after they’ve got engaged. It doesn’t help either when they throw in how great the rest of their lives are, so it is with a certain amount of apprehension that I drop into conversation that so far this year, Jo and I have had no fewer than seven mini breaks.

I should point out that this is purely through good fortune and is circumstantial. The ‘me’ twelve months ago would have ranted about how nice it would have been to have a day off, let alone a series of mini breaks. Going away that much does start to get tricky. Don’t get me wrong, I’m utterly grateful that fate has dealt the holidaying equivalent of the royal flush, but the more time you spend away in lovely locations, the greater the expectations and higher your standards are for the next destination.

I have to admit to having done no forward research on The Point before we got there. For all I knew, we could have been going to another campsite, the previous weekend having been spent listening to the familiar and moral-sappingly English sound of rain on canvas. View Post

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When I asked the lovely people of Twitter for their top tip for travelling with kids, several people advised that the best thing to do was to leave them at home. This may often feel like the sensible option, but actually there are a lot of benefits to travelling with children.

  • You get to pack lots of fun snacks, take regular toilet breaks and go to bed early, all with the excuse that it’s ‘for the kids’.
  • You can do fun things like ride on steam trains, build sandcastles, play crazy golf and eat candy floss, because you’re selfless like that, and always thinking of the children.
  • Travelling with children actually gives you a completely new and fascinating view of the world because they notice all the little, fun things that grown-ups always miss.

travelling with kids

Travelling with kids also means you end up at some really weird places. Would I ever have visited the Portreath Bee Centre for example if I hadn’t been looking for something to keep us amused in the rain? Or the National Wool Museum? I don’t even want to think about how my life might have turned out differently had I never visited Williton’s Bakelite Museum. View Post

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It’s Sunday morning, about 9am, and I’m lying in what may be the biggest bed in the world. If I sit forward just a tiny bit and look out of the window I can see the sea. I starfish, enjoying the space and the feel of the lovely fresh linen. I’m on my own as my boyfriend has taken Belle out with him to play a round of golf, teeing off from just next door to our apartment. One of the things on Belle’s bucket list, alongside ‘be in a car crash’,* is to drive a golf buggy.

We are staying for the weekend at The Point at Polzeath, down on the north coast of Cornwall. We are in one of their new luxury three bedroom apartments – Fitzroy – and luxury is about the right word for it. Designed as a holiday home, it’s at least twice the size of our non-holiday home and far better equipped – the finish is impeccable and the attention to detail superb, something that always makes a holiday so much more enjoyable.

The Point review View Post

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I already mentioned in my post about my £6 bingo win that we recently went away for the weekend to Ladram Baby and that it was my boyfriend’s first ever time in a caravan.* It certainly wasn’t the first time for me and Belle though, but I can definitely say that it was one of our favourite caravan holidays in a long time – we were very impressed with the accommodation, the location and the newly refurbished facilities at the park, especially the swimming pool.

Where is Ladram Bay?

Ladram Bay is in Devon, on the stretch of coast between Sidmouth and Exmouth.

Ladram Bay map

It’s very accessible, especially for us – we got there from Taunton in under an hour. In fact, it was so handy that we ended up staying the Sunday night too and leaving at 7am on Monday morning, knowing we’d be back in plenty of time for school. I think for just a weekend it’s brilliant to be able to do this – who wants to spend precious time travelling when we have such a beautiful spot practically on the doorstep? View Post

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This week I signed up to Stumble Upon. I suspect I may be about 17 years behind people on this one, but to be honest my life is so full already of useless information that I’ve resisted adding to it. Other bloggers keep telling me how useful it is as a way to get new readers though, so I thought I should give it a bash.

I picked ‘travel’ as one of the categories I was interested in and was immediately bombarded with beautiful posts with titles like ’47 places so stunning you won’t believe they are this planet’ and ‘The 26 most colourful deserts in the world’. I don’t know what it is about posts like this, but they make me feel slightly inadequate. In my mind the titles translate into ’47 places you’d have visited by now if you were cool enough, loser’ and ‘The 26 most colourful deserts visited by all those people in the world who are braver and more interesting than you.’

I think this could be my problem.

*glosses quickly over self-esteem issues*

With some spaces still up for grabs though on my 40 things before 40 list, I have been inspired to think about unusual places I’d like to visit. They don’t have to be on the other side of the world, although I do fancy a road trip across America, but they do need to be a little bit unusual – I don’t like travelling only to feel like I could be in the middle of the UK. I love the idea of somewhere like Iceland, where the scenery is dramatically different from the Somerset countryside.

I turned to Twitter for ideas, as I do for most things in life, and here’s what my online chums suggested… View Post

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After revelations last week that Bee has been to Wookey Hole, I thought she might also be interested to know, (although I think she does already), that her first proper outing, aged about a week old, was to Glastonbury.

I’ve always liked Glastonbury and although I wouldn’t consider myself a particularly spiritual person there is something about it that draws me in when I’m feeling a little restless or like I need to recharge or refocus. It has a soothing effect on me, calming me and making me feeling more positive about things.

Like with all places you’ve been visiting since a child, certain rituals and routines become established, and a visit to Glastonbury for us always means lunch at the Blue Note Cafe. I’m pretty sure it’s not the best cafe in Glastonbury, but it’s just where we have always gone. As a child, I particularly enjoyed asking for the code for the toilets and going out to the courtyard, around the corner past the dragon holding a ball, and feeling like a spy, inputting the numbers on the metal panel.

Things to do in Glastonbury View Post

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family holiday in walesWe’ve been to quite a few holiday parks in Wales – can you tell from the picture? – and so we are old hands at knowing what to pack. Here are nine essentials:

1. Clean pants

If you ever go anywhere without packing clean pants then there is something wrong with you.

2. Credit cards

For when you run out of pants. In all seriousness, I do tend to think that as long as I have remembered a credit card I can always buy the things I forget. For some reason I always forget a hairbrush, wherever we go. I think it’s because I normally keep them in the kitchen rather than in a sensible place with all of the other toiletries. View Post

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