Battle of Hastings

While M and M stayed home with chicken pox, I took J and his friend Ben down to Hastings to the annual battle of hastings reenactment. A beautiful sunny day, takes about 2.5 hrs to get down to Battle Abbey in Kent (only a few miles from Hastings, and the Abbey was built after the battle, so I guess they had to call it something other than the battle of that hill with the apple tree on the road to London just outside Hastings...). The abbey is as usual a ruin, thank Henry for that (again), but quite well preserved. Reenactments are a lot of fun, there were about a hundred small boys with swords running around hitting each other, the boys had a blast. The actual reenactment was good (I forgot to get the camera out of the car so no pics), some great displays of knightly skills - chop the cabbage, hit people with the stick etc, all on horseback and on foot. There was also some falconry displays, the best bit was the black kite who decided to make a bid for freedom and just took off and kept going.

We stayed overnight at the YHA and did a beach crawl back up the south coast this morning - Winchelsea Beach (rocks)
Romney Sands at Dungeness - rocks.

and finally the beach at Dymchurch - sand!! We had to wait for the tide to go out so looked at the local Martello towers, built to repel Napoleon. After a while on the beach the sun came out and so did the local donkey handlers, so the boys had a donkey ride to cap off their weekend. Both pretty tired and starting to bait each other by the time we got back to Cambridge, I think we made it just in time to avoid a major fight in the car!