HORSHAM

We arrive at the campground which is near the small village of Newchapel near Lingfield and Scot is happy to see a quaint local pub just down the road. We are shown in by the warden who is from the Czech Republic and he is interested to know we have travelled to their country. We have a pitch where we can put the car next to the van and it is a bit weird to be back in the van again but at the same time we feel like we are back ‘home’. We settle in and get ourselves sorted out.  It is weird having a little car with us but it will be great as we can leave the van to charge up in the campground and head off somewhere.

April 8th

We leave the van in the campground for the day and head off in our wee car to Dorking. We drove through this village one day and decided we wanted to come back and explore and also check out the op shops for some cheap work clothes and that time is coming nearer again.  After breakfast we head off up there.  The roads in these areas are all very narrow and it is ok in a small car but everyone drives like maniacs and do terrible speeds on them that it does get a bit scary.  I am not happy doing over the speed limit as even then it seems to be too fast for some of their roads but seemingly I am too slow and get passed at high speed even when bends are approaching.  Crazy bastards really as there is nowhere to go if a car comes around the corner. Tailgating is also very common.  It never bothered me in the van as they can see I am driving a large vehicle and I go as slow as I need to in it.  People forget that campervans have all your crockery, glasses, bottles etc and you can’t jeopardise that by flying around corners.  I hate it being back in the car though but I just slow down and make them wait if they are that crazy.

In Dorking we park up and check out the shops. The chicken is the town symbol as apparently they breed a lot of them in this area, so the main big roundabout has a large chicken on it.  They have heaps of op shops which we take our time going around.  I find a couple of things to buy plus a jigsaw puzzle that I am looking forward to doing.  I love puzzles but you have to have the time to sit and figure them out which normally wouldn’t happen.  The puzzle I did in Woking was fine until one of the Vizlas ate a piece that fell on the floor – buggar!  We did get the piece back but it was a grey salivary blob that at the time we weren’t 100% sure it was a piece of puzzle until the end of it and there was a piece missing!  We have lunch at a lovely little café in town where they make all their own food and they are a little more healthy.  Funny that over here a café does not have to have their own toilet for customers.  You have to go down the road if you need one.  I am grateful there is a Waitrose in town as it appears that they have the only loo in the main centre and it seems that everyone has come to use it.

5pm and it is time to join the peak hour traffic and head back to the camper. We have had to fill the meter a couple of times and it is a bugger here where you have to put the exact amount in for the time you want or you lose the change.  So if it costs 3 pounds for 2 hours and you only have 4 pounds, it won’t tack on 40 extra minutes you lose the extra pound or you have to put say 4.50 pounds in to get 3 hours.  I am sure it is to profit from the fact that most won’t have the correct change to put in the meter.  Anyway we head off ‘home’ and the traffic is slow and there are long queues.  It’s no wonder  when people drive and the roads are congested when the prices of trains are horrendous.  An average trip on the train into the heart of London from just outside can be as much as 40 pounds return each.  That is why the traffic congestion is so bad everywhere.  I always thought they had a great train system – which they do, but at a horrendous price.

We get back to the van and decide since we have a pub within walking distance for the first time since we arrived back here we will go down and have a drink. It is quite packed since it is a Friday night but we have one drink – which is quite expensive – and then head back to Morrie for dinner.

Saturday 9th April

We head out late morning as the owners aren’t going to be ready for us to arrive until later in the day but we decide to head up anyway and we can leave the van in their carpark and head into town with the car for an hour or two. We leave the van behind and head into Horsham town.  Being a Saturday it is busy but we find a park that is right by a pool we will check out for swimming later.  We walk into the town centre and we find they have a few market stalls around.  The town looks very nice and they have a big modern shopping centre right in the centre of it.  We will check that out another day.  We walk around and I am hungry so decide to buy a frittata in a deli style shop.  Unfortunately for me it is the worst food I have had in a while and it was expensive.  A small piece of frittata for 6 pounds, well you have to try these places and now I know I won’t be going back there again.

Mid afternoon we head back to the farmhouse we are looking after. This place is a part 13th century Farmhouse on 5 acres.  It has a large lake which attracts all types of birds and has fish in it.  The gardens are lovely and we overlook lovely green paddocks.  It is certainly peaceful, well except for some housing development that is going on close by which is a great shame as this place was right out in the countryside and obviously a farmer has sold off his land for housing.  The owners show us around the house and then have so much to do to get themselves organised so we make ourselves at home whilst they then go out for dinner.  Boris the cat is who we are looking after and he is a lovely good sized pussycat.  A little aloof you could say but later I find out he actually loves cuddles and attention when given.

The owners leave the next day early and we proceed to move all our gear into the house after breakfast. I don’t feel comfortable to move all our personal possessions in and our food bins and fridge food while the owners are still around.  It feels much better for us to do this after they have left.  We check out the gardens and lawns we will look after and there is a swimming pool but it will remain under cover until they are back as they feel it isn’t necessary to burden us with getting it ready for the summer.

We enjoy our first weekend at the house where we have a comfortable good sized bed so we sleep well. We get ourselves organised in the kitchen which is huge and has massive cream bench tops which you really wouldn’t want to spill anything on or discolour them in anyway as that would be devastating. There is a large conservatory style room on the end where it gets sun all day and it’s a great room to just sit and read (and  great for puzzles).  Like all houses they have an oil heating system that starts up around 5am to warm the house up and switches off midmorning only to restart up around 6pm to warm the house at the end of the day.  I really would hate to be the one footing the bill for the heating in a house this large.

On Monday morning we head into the town centre as I was supposed to drive over to Swansea today to hand in our Aussie drivers licences and passports to swap the licences for UK ones. However after much thought and agonising we decided it wasn’t a good idea for one of us to drive the 5 hours trip over to Wales to try and get our passports back straight away so we post them all off hoping they don’t take too long.  We then talk to the pool staff and sign up for a 6 week plan they have on which will make it about 1pound per visit for the pool.  Not a bad price especially since most pools here are 5 or 6 pounds (10-12 AUD) per entry.  Very expensive paying 25AUD just for a swim for us both.  Anyway we then go in for a swim.  We only have a 25 metre pool but that is better than the 14m pool in Spain.  It has been a while since we swam in a 25m pool and we find the 1km swim quite tough on the first day but still succeed.  It will get easier each day. They also have many op shops here so we will be able to check them out as well.

Over the first week Boris doesn’t seem to be around very much and I feel he goes missing for very long periods of time. We have a morning where he has obviously just eaten elsewhere as he hasn’t had any biscuits at home and he brings up a whole lot of them encompassed in what looks like mouse innards – yuck!  Unpleasant to clean up.  He often brings in mice so he isn’t allowed into the main house area at night.  He gets shut into the kitchen conservatory area where he can come and go outside if he wants to.  There are mice traps in the kitchen for the live ones he brings in, but these ones are brilliant and very humane.  They just shut the mouse in the trap alive and you can see something has been caught when you get up in the morning and then let the poor mouse back into the bush outside.  Over the past 4 weeks we have caught 3 mice.  The first one got let go only I think to be re-caught the next night.  When we let him out the second time however he is very wobbly and goes around in circles.  We realise Boris has been hassling it all night and it is very unwell.  We still let it out but unfortunately a few minutes later a bird swoops down and he is history.  The next one is luckier, it gets to run away very quickly and we haven’t seen it since.

Since we have been here we have virtually had so little rain it has been great, but the gardens may need to start being watered if there isn’t much soon. The days we have had have been lovely and fairly warm in the morning, but seem to cool in the afternoon when it looks like it may rain but doesn’t.  We have had to mow the lawns each week which take quite a few hours even with the ride on mower. Scot has been doing some water blasting on the pavers for the owners which makes the outside areas look quite amazing.  I get stuck into some gardening as of course with spring there are many weeds popping up all over the place.  They have lots of nettles coming up in the garden which really just take over completely and the beautiful bluebell flowers get drowned by them.  I pull out as many as I can but it is hard work.  We buy some pansies and I pot them up to put on the patio.  I haven’t had pansies around since my teen years in Dunedin and I just adore their colour so I decide to enjoy them while we are here.

We have been for a couple of walks around the countryside and the lovely spring flowers are all starting to bloom along the walkways. We walked to Christs Hospital – a kind of suburb but was based on a snotty school that was built there.  They had a pool as well but they wouldn’t let us become members as we weren’t here long enough.  The main walk travels on a public walkway on a farmers property and follows the Arun river. We have stayed previously at Arundel down south with the big castle and the town is named after this river. The river here is quite small but the surrounding area is covered with bluebells and in parts is a fantastic sea of blue. Further in the walk the foliage is starting to sprout a white cluster flower which tastes like onion and garlic. Partway at the beginning of the walk you can look across at the house we are in and sitting in the sun we can see the walkers coming and going.

Our daily routine here consists of breakfast, emails etc and then off to the pool for our 1km swim, back home to a very green smoothie and lunch and then into the garden or waterblasting in the afternoon. Boris loves to join me in the garden in the afternoon.  We don’t see a lot of him except when in the garden or when he is asleep in his bed on the couch during the day.  We sit outside early evening with a book and a drink and watch the many people walking along the public path in the farm we overlook, with their dogs and children.  We have started to look for jobs and have completed our CV’s ready to hand over.  We have registered with a doctor – it is strange here.  You can only register with one doctor and they have to be within 3 miles of where you live.  You aren’t allowed to go to any other doctor, only the one you register with.  We don’t know yet how that works when you work away from your home and you need to visit a doctor.  You are allowed to go to another one a couple of times over a 2 week period but no more than that.  I guess we will find out down the track how that works.  We are just waiting on our UK licences.  We had to give them our Aussie licences and they get sent back to Australia and cancelled.  I wish I had known that before we paid to renew them just before we left, what a waste of money.

We have also managed to secure several other house sits. It seems my fears of not being able to get any were completely unfounded.  I seem to manage to get any that I apply for now and have even been approached by several I have had to turn down as we are already busy or they are a little out of the area we are heading to live in.  This area is Milton Keynes which is a bit north of London outside the M25.  We have a house sit there for 6 months from November so we are heading to live there and we are looking at jobs there as well.  Over the next 6 months we have quite a few house sits, but we often have a couple or more days in between where we don’t have anywhere to live.  So I decided we needed to have a rented room in a share house where we can put the majority of our stuff and stay in between our sits.  After a couple of weeks looking I manage to secure a room in a share house which seems to be the way most people do it here.  It is really expensive to rent your own place and unlike Australia or NZ you pay all the council rates, water usage etc  etc.  Plus you pay a huge amount up front, that is non-refundable, for the real estate to do checks on you and that could easily amount to 1500 pounds or Aud3000 just to get into a house.  Then you pay your rent plus all other amounts each month.  So it is an expensive exercise so it seems most people just share a house with others as it keeps the cost down.  Our room is with a landlord and one other renter so we will see what that is like.  We will only be there when we don’t have a house sit but we will leave all our stuff there. Most are from Monday to Friday so the landlord gets the weekend free and the lodgers must spend the weekend at home. I would say that is because they are working away from home and this is the cheapest option. Our landlord has agreed to let us stay weekends but we have said we will probably either have sits organised or will be away exploring on the weekends.

We have visited a few areas close by. We went to Brighton and met up with a friend of a friend. Unfortunately we arrived on a day they had a marathon on so it was total chaos and took us ages to just get there, so we picked up Jenny and headed out of Brighton along the water front to Eastbourne.  It is lovely along the esplanade down south.  No wonder so many people head there for their weekends, however when you have a look at the prices for hotels or b&b’s it is so expensive.  The average price for an ordinary hotel room somewhere in Brighton is around 200pounds for a Saturday night but some charge 400 pounds upwards and they aren’t 5 star hotels.  We had thought we would go down for a weekend but I don’t think that will happen seeing those prices.  We had a drive around Eastbourne which is a lot quieter and far less touristy than Brighton and in fact I would probably prefer staying there for a weekend.

We spent a day down at Petworth which is a really cool little village, quite quirky and lots of antique shops. They actually had on an antique fair when we were there so there were quite a few people around.  It was a really warm day as well and I am sure we got sunburnt sitting having lunch outside a little café.  There is a huge house – Petworth House which we didn’t get a chance to have a look around but maybe we will go back some time. Driving around the countryside is really nice and we see some beautiful old (and new but look old) stately homes. Scot will have to photo them as he has started to draw them in ink. He has done one for the owners where we are currently staying and turned out quite good so hope they like it. Maybe he can sell a few as art here seems to attract good $$. Unfortunatly we have not really done justice to the area exploring as we have been busy which is a shame. Scot has repaired the fibreglass back of the van and fixed minor things so it looks good for sale. On one Saturday we went to the spring festival in Horsham town and had prime spot and had a coffee and watched all the dancing, drumming and bands which was very cultural and fun. We had such a good possie that we made the local paper photo, the trouble was it was our backs! Maybe the best side anyway. Vicki has already had a job interview and a follow up one soon so hopefully everything will fall into place. I will wait till we are up in MK and start looking as my type of work I think will be easier to find when I am there.

It will be a bit sad leaving this area and south of London but we are looking forward to our next sits and working life north of London and excited as well. Being more settled we may be able to explore more. We have purposely not got any housesits in August so we can stay at the share house and travel on the weekends hopefully even to Paris or Berlin. Also we want to see a few museums and Scot wants to check out a couple of the car, motorcycle and aircraft museums in the area.

Another update hopefully won’t take as long as this one has.

 

2 thoughts on “HORSHAM”

  1. Train fares much cheaper if you can advance purchase (6 to 10 weeks ahead is ideal – we cd do Manchester to London for £10 instead of £130) through http://www.nationalrail.co.uk. If buying a walk up fare on the day and not needing to travel business hours go for off peak return for less than half.

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