Skip to main content

Whistling Sands

The campsite at Morfa Nefyn is at Porth Dinllaen Farm (no website but there’s a link here) and has been run for five seasons by an on-site warden and his wife.

Eric retired from the army and decided to do this. As a quartermaster in such places as Kuwait and Afghanistan, he has all the right credentials and you can see his influence. CoVID19 security was tight with gels mandatory entering and leaving the kitchen or washrooms. These are cleaned three times a day. Who else would do this early and late?



Next season, post-Eric, the farm family are apparently going to run the site. I wouldn’t want to judge but looking at the farm, I doubt that they will be as effective as Eric.

We moved on towards our next campsite at the end of the peninsula, stopping off at the NT car park above the Whistling Sands beach, Porth Oer. Here the sand is supposed to whistle when you walk on it but we weren’t holding our breath, as a camper had been and said nothing happened when he tried!

Firstly though we had a great conversation with a couple driving a Land Rover 88” in original shabby condition. The payment machine indicated that an app could be used and so I did. However mine was out of date and needed an update and then re-entry of my credentials. There was the modern version of a queue; not people searching for change or trying to enter details into a dodgy keypad. Rather we were all heads down in our phones, entering details like vehicle type ( I almost used our Golf which was already setup).

Then of course I needed the loo and this made me chuckle. 



The beach is fabulous and you can indeed make the sand whistle. Although, as Edmund Hyde Hall put it so eloquently in c1810, “ it emits a shrill crackling noise, curious certainly but very offensive to the sense of hearing”.



We went for a swim. I know it’s September and so the water is supposed to be warm. It wasn’t. Not a bit. We had a good swim and full immersion but after ten/fifteen minutes we were ready to get out. Let’s just say that it took most of the rest of the day to get warm even after a romp up and along the cliff! 😁





Labels

Labels:

Comments

Rachel said…
Fantastic post - impressed that you swam.. Phil and I managed a sea swim in West Runton which was also a bit on the chilly side. Feels good afterwards though (once you manage to eventually get warm). Good for you too, all that freezing water!
11 September 2020 at 18:35
Tim said…
Thanks Rach 😁
11 September 2020 at 18:45
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On y va

Hooray. We are off. The ferry was booked a few weeks ago and the pressure was then on to get all sorts of jobs finished on the house and Landy. Major cosmetic work was to cover the grey front doors with paint that matches the rest of the vehicle. On the engine a coolant leak had developed behind the water pump and so the P gasket and adjacent core plug were renewed. Also a cheapy head unit from those Chinese people replaced the old Sony fm radio. Now we have opened up the wonders of Car Play and all that comes with it. Finally the 9th gen iPad with WiFi became a 9th gen iPad with WiFi and ‘cellular’. This means we can use OsmAnd Maps which need no data and get their gps position off the ‘cellular’ chip in the iPad. More on this useful map in subsequent posts. We headed towards Portsmouth for a mid morning ferry via our old neighbours in S-I-V. There we had a great few hours updating each about our families and then proceeded to save the NHS, the country and the world too. I mean why no...
Post a Comment
Read more

Onwards

You can’t visit a classic car enthusiast without admiring their car and we got our timing right, as it was the monthly club meet on Sunday. This was held at the Hippodrome in Maisons Laffitte, so it was just up the road. The definition of ‘classic’ here is 30 years and so many of the vehicles there looked very familiar to us 😳. TR5 and TR6, MGB, RR, BMW, Maserati, of course the Jensen Interceptor that our host drives, 2CV, Caterham 7, a beautiful Austin Healy 3 litre and then this… This is identical to mine, a Fiat 850 Sport Coupé, that I owned from 1978-81. Seeing it, brought back memories of welding, brazing, stripped driveshaft splines, clutch on the M1 and many miles of amazing touring. We drove around France on a camping road trip for all of September 1978 and the following year did the Ardennes for a month too. Here’s Nige’s Jensen… Maisons Laffitte is a very nice area to the west of Paris centre. The mansion is now owned by a trust I think and is a beautiful building. All we ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

Towards Savoie

We stayed on the motorway, which for us is unusual in France but we have experienced the traffic calming in the towns and villages. A direct and fast journey was planned and achieved, with  a  nice morning stop and appropriate accompaniments. We arrived at Saint-Jean-de-Chevelu which is a little west of Lac du Bourget, the huge lake which has Aix- les-Bains on its eastern shore. We went to a previously researched campsite, Camping des lacs. This is a lovely spot of about 100 places for a mix of tents, camper-vans and smaller motor homes. There are also cabins and some that were a bit like shepherd’s huts. It’s situated next to two small lakes (surprise!) and there’s a ring of small mountains around. These would have been peri-glacial lakes 🥸 back at the last ice age and have now become a joint playground and eco place. You can swim, fish and respect ‘nature’ here but need to get in the right part at the right time to do what’s allowed. A lady pecheur told us of carp and ...
Post a Comment
Read more