What follows is blatant self-indulgent showboating, sorry folks! It’s been such a lovely August that we had to post about it; even if the only link to the project is that the content is about us…
Duhdah… Conveyancing Update! All is ticking along nicely according to Jane our solicitor, we are just making the final arrangements for money transfer and have now confirmed our target move in date – September 15th, that means that time in our temporary home on harbour street will soon come to an end. It’s a funny little place, you have to climb up a steep flight of stairs to get to the front door, once in there’s a useable little kitchen, hostel like shower and a big living room that overlooks the high street (this is cool for people watching).
Upstairs there are two bedrooms; one also overlooks the high street whilst the other has this killer view:
This little apartment is worth the rent alone just for this! Unfortunately we won’t have a sea view at the project location, but we will be on a whisper quiet street just a 10 minute walk away, to afford a house with space and a sea view costs a lot in Whitstable, seeing as we like to be outside and to walk, we decided we would rather have space and a smaller mortgage!
So what have we been up to over the past few weeks? Generally making the most of the sunshine! You might not see too much in the photos but honestly it’s been warm.
Harbour Day is completely different to the slick professionalism of the Whitstable Oyster Festival, it has a DIY, bring and buy sale feel to it (we like this both). Highlights for big or little kids are the Punch & Judy show and the chance to look round some ocean going boats. Animal lovers must check out Splash Pals, a dedicated and slightly crazy group of people that spend their spare time teaching New Foundland dogs how to rescue people. These giants of the canine world love the water and generally throw themselves in whenever they get a chance. Some people have two or three of the things; maybe they’ve built an extension especially?
Our favourite parts of Harbour day are also sea based, but a little more conventional… We loved the Historic Thames Barge Race; this is actually (a little) better than it sounds! The barges look like classic sailing boats rather than the plodding variety that you might associate with a canal. Because they use canvas to power through the water they look really lovely from the foreshore:
The other, and in my opinion best part of harbour day is our local group of sea shanty singers. Dressed in head to toe blue with a tankard in hand they looked the part, particularly because most of them truly do bear more than a passing resemblance to that maritime icon Captain Birdseye. They sang there hearts out this year and really added to the atmosphere, well done Mark & team.
What else has been going on? Well we’ve been going a bit London Olympics mad … Seeing as we have no TV, we have been in the pub most days on lime sodas (honest) watching the events unfold, we haven’t just been spectating from afar though! Watts managed to get us Paralympic Athletics tickets and I managed to snaffle some last minute Olympic volleyball seats, lucky indeed!
Watts’ mum Carol told us about her father’s love of sport and how he regretted not getting down to see the previous London Olympiad. Not being the types for harbouring regret (did you get that one) we wanted to make sure we saw something. This called for several hours clicking around manically on the twitter for next release of returned tickets, eventually we hit the jackpot!
Not too much more to show really, we havn’t seemed to take that many pictures in the past few weeks. We did find these lovely wild flowers growing in a massive patch in nearby Tankerton 🙂OK
Our Eco House 