Saturday was rather grumpy and chore-filled, but Sunday was lovely.





We (all of us except Stephen, who said he'd rather stay home and study for his imminent AS exams) left home at 6am to drive the 2.5 hours down to Portland, on the coast in Dorset, to do some climbing. The beach you can see in the picture above is Chesil Beach - pebbly, but pretty.

The climbing is beautiful at Portland - the cliffs are right on the sea, so as you climb you hear the waves below you, and see the seagulls swooping around you. When you get there, you walk down a really steep little path to the bottom of the cliffs, and then work your way across the boulders at the water's edge till you get to the climbing. The cliffs have very distinct bands of different rock where we were climbing - thinner bands of sharp grey granitey stuff that rips your fingers up a bit but has lots of good holds, and wider bands of smooth sandstone that don't hurt you, but where there's nothing to grab.







The girls had a good time exploring when they weren't actually climbing, and reading on the rocks inbetween times, when they were tired. I had one slightly hairy moment, though, when I was almost at the top of a climb (with Bobby belaying me, so he needed to concentrate on me) and looked down to see Sophie balanced extremely precariously on a slippery, slimy, seaweedy rock looking as though she was about to plunge into the (very cold) water. I distinctly saw the couple who were climbing alongside us smirk at each other when I had to shriek at her to GET OFF THAT ROCK RIGHT NOW SOPHIE LAURA, NO YOU ARE NOT ALRIGHT THERE, CLIMB DOWN RIGHT NOW!!!

She emerged unscathed from that little episode, but sure enough she did end the day wet, slimy, green in places, and with a rather sea-weedy fishy sort of aroma. But she did all that while under our direct supervision, and the process seemed to make her happy, so that's okay I suppose.






It was a lovely day. The sun shone, the climbs were really fun, and we came home with that pleasant tired-from-a-long-day-outside feeling. The rest of the Portland pictures are here. The rock that Sophie almost fell off is the pointy green slimy one in the picture that's captioned "Now how do we get off again?" It looks a lot bigger in real life, I might add.