Road Trip to Center Parcs Eleveden Forest - Day Three - Breckland Apartments

Evening time falls at Breackland

Well thankfully we were woken at 8:04 this morning by five or six F15's taking off from Lakenheath as I seriously forgot to set my alarm last night.

The last thing my phone said to me last night was "You are in Elveden, it is going to rain in Elveden tomorrow, you may need an umbrella"! Charming, that's all you need before you close your eyes, however, I'm happy to report that we woke to bright blue skies and I'm still looking at a fading blue sky devoid of anything but the tiniest cotton wool clouds, Samsung may make good phones, but they are thankfully rubbish with the weather!

We are really ready for bed, it's been an action packed day.

We started with breakfast on the balcony. We have a tradition with cereals. At home cereal is Bran Flakes (Lauren loves these I don't force them on her!!), Shreddies,  Porridge, Weetabix, the most adventurous we get are Honey Cheerios, but come holiday time it's a cereal free for all - Krave being Lauren's usual vice - the more chocolatey the better. We've both gone for crunchy nut clusters this time, Lauren chocolate and me peanut butter. However, I wanted to be more on plan than just a big bowl of sugary cereal so I had a bowl of Onken Strawberry 0% yoghurt, topped with strawberries and a little peanut butter crunch - I would like to show you this, but I scoffed it before I gave my camera a second thought!

Our first activity of the day was badminton - we travelled over to the Jardin de Sports on our bikes, our new found love! We booked some bowling for tomorrow (must remember black underwear as the ultra violets will be on, Lauren was just a floating bra last time we played!). We had fun at badminton, we didn't play seriously, no scoring, but we managed quite a few long rallies which is great for us. We laughed a lot and we played for the full 45 minutes give or take the odd stop for water.

Next we popped to Starbucks so Lauren could have her Double Choc Chip Frappacino that she's been craving since last years holiday. Then on to the supermarket, we returned Ghost in the Shell, I didn't know what to make of that, it wasn't what I expected, don't think I enjoyed it so much. For tonight we picked up Lost City of Z, a film with Tom Holland in that Lauren has been bugging me about since she grew her teenage crush on Tom.

One of these lunches is Slimming World friendly, can you guess?

We biked back to the apartment for lunch. I had a bang on plan lunch of ham and mushroom omlette with my healthy A cheese, salad and baked beans.

After lunch we played a game of Scrabble and had a few pick n mix from Treats the sweet shop, Lauren trounced me with just a little help - her opening word of "Quails" scored 50, but then I got a Scrabble scoring 64, but she just motored on and beat my by about 60 points.

Skater girl

Good game, good game

We had to be at the Sports bar for Lauren's roller skating at 4:45pm, she roller skated non-stop at the Disco for an hour and limped off with an aching ankle, but was raring to go for a bike round the village. We really did do the whole village, at one point we laughed as we coasted down a hill chasing F15's, the smile was wiped from our faces when we came to a dead end by the amazing Tree houses and realised we had to cycle all the way back up the hill, OK, it wasn't that big a hill, but for us novices it was gruelling! The squirrels are abundant at the moment and are showing kamikaze tendencies, I had to emergency stop twice much to Lauren's amusement to avoid running over squirrels that just ran right out in front of me. The verges were dotted with rabbits and ducks and the trees are teeming with bird life.

Tree houses, look amazing, but way out of our
price range! 

We biked back to the apartment to freshen up and then walked to the Country Club for tea. As we walked past the golf club we were delighted to see a resting hare (we think) and then two Muntjac deer grazing in the trees.

Haddock

At the Country Club once my jubiliation at finding a Diet Coke (not Pepsi) had passed, we decided on fish pie, but it had sold out so we had to go for Fish and Chips instead, the alternatives were pie or burgers which we've already had at the hotel. I would have liked steak but it was £20.95 for a 7oz sirloin  which I thought was extortionate. Gammon, egg and chips is my usual pub meal but I had an omelette for lunch - 5 eggs in one day is too much even for me!

We asked for one portion of bread for Lauren but we got 2 and the dinner beat us, we both left some. We had bought cake at the shop earlier for pudding so we didn't have to pay restaurant prices, but I have had to pass on mine I'm too full. A certain someone still had her Krispy Kreme - I don't know why she likes them. I'm happy to have come to terms with the fact that I don't like them - not even the Reese's ones, it's the texture I think, give me a supermarket jam doughnut any day (well maybe not any day!).

See what Krispy Kreme's do to you!!

We came back to the apartment where we were treated to an evening air show including a fly over the apartments. We sat and watched the new BBC Big Family Cooking Showdown, but I wasn't too impressed, the presenters didn't engage me and I thought the people were a bit annoying and not sure about the whole concept really - maybe it's a grower!

A strange thing happened, just after I got out of the shower there was a soft but persistent knocking on the door. I enquired who it was and a strangely fake sounding but probably real Swedish male voice announced they were the neighbour and didn't know how to use the cooker. This was too surreal for me to even consider opening the door and I know how scary I look in my pyjamas with unbrushed hair. I shouted back that the instructions were in a folder by the TV and actually if they pressed the on button a full menu would appear on the cooker. This seemed to appease them and off they went.

Now we are settling down in bed with our coffees to watch Lost City of Z - I'm sure it's not going to be appropriate, so will have to do some careful distracting - wish me luck, will fill you in tomorrow, night :-)

Muntjac

There is a hare here - honest! Just squint and stare at the middle!

Biker girl