20 family and three dogs go to the seaside - West Sussex

The title isn’t quite accurate because only 11 actually saw the sea but it appealed to me.

It’s always fun to get as many of the family together as possible, even if it does mean staying beside the sea in late October (in England). It’s not always easy as we are fairly scattered over two continents but we do manage it from time to time. We’ve never yet got all four children and their families together in one place and we didn’t quite manage it this time. Dave, Tara and Simon were busy at work and school in California and Jessica couldn’t take a week out of University to travel over from Kentucky but, as Vickie said afterwards, “We're so fortunate to have family we can miss."

This year we rented a cottage in West Wittering  in West Sussex for a week and managed to gather a total of 20 variously related folk and three dogs at various times. I’m not even going to attempt to say who is related to who as it doesn’t really matter and it might give you a headache.

First to arrive were Alan, Pat and Mac. We weren’t staying at the cottage but in our caravan a short distance away. We arrived on the Thursday evening, much later than planned and settled in for a reasonably early night as Alan planned to leave at crack of dawn to Heathrow to collect Vickie, Jay and Darvik who were flying in from Cincinatti.
Rosie, Mike and Dan couldn’t leave Plymouth till late afternoon due to school and work and planned to stop overnight in Bournemouth on the way and meet up with James (from Manchester) who joined us for the weekend.

All went well with the journeys and settling in, Rosie and family joining us on the Saturday morning.