July has been a very muddy month for me! It started with my Trailwalker challenge in mid July, which took place in absolutely dire conditions (officially the worst yet!) I did manage to finish in just under 27 hours, but I swear I have never seen (or trudged through) so many different types of mud…

Of course as soon as it was over the weather cleared up beautifully and as you know we had been having glorious sunshine since the schools broke up for the summer holidays. So I had high hopes for the 5 day camping trip we had booked this week… 

It did start well, and we had a couple of lovely days playing tennis, going for long walks on the beaches and even managed a barbeque on the first night. Unfortunately it then all started to go rapidly downhill.

The rain set in on the second afternoon and the pitch we were camped on turned into a mud bath. Rather than the occasional light showers predicted we had steady heavy rain for ages which meant we couldn’t cook or barbecue and were more or less tent bound. We spent the evenings in the pub, which would normally be a good thing, but it wasn’t what we’d planned and started to get a bit expensive… our 11 year old boys eat about as much as we do these days!

We probably would have been fine without the kids, but the campsite was full of miserable children who couldn’t swim, cycle or play and in the end we decided to come home a day early and watch the Olympics instead

So apologies that I can’t share any new camp fire recipes with you, but I can tell you how to get rid of just about any type of mud stain there is.

What would you have done? Do you have any secret tricks to keeping kids happy in a tent when the weather is miserable? Or would you have wussed out like we did?