Walsingham Round Up

We arrived home on Friday morning at 2:30am!  That drive that is only meant to take four and a half hours never seems to work for me :-)  We set off at 7:30pm expecting to arrive home around midnight and would you believe it there was a traffic jam followed by a fire on A1 so we were re-routed in order to join the main motorway intersection further along and this added an hour and a half to our journey.  The last leg of the journey was pretty tortuous and Dave kept chatting to me in order to keep me awake.  Once home I collapsed into bed totally exhausted.  Thankfully we all slept in so I was able to catch up on much needed sleep :-)

The last few days have been a mixture of catching up with laundry, food shopping and entertaining the grown kids for an unexpected but lovely visit from them all.  I finally got around to mowing the lawns this afternoon, the grass was past my ankles!  I am really hoping that this time next year grass mowing will be a thing of the past.  We have a landscaper coming on Friday to offer advice on making the garden easier to maintain since I am no longer able to keep on top of things.

We start our first official "home school day" tomorrow but will be keeping things light until we have found a workable groove.  I seem to have another week of various appointments and commitments and they sure do eat into the homeschool day.  We are away again for the last week in September and so I am hoping that by the beginning of October I will have sussed out a reasonable and workable routine for us all.

So before the Autumn season is well and truly upon us, I will leave you with a snap shot of summer from a very special place:

Anglican Shrine Cafe on the last day.  It was a mother and son treat that I promised Benedict as he had been so helpful with the little ones and uncomplaining about the sudden daily attendance at mass :-)

 

 Gluten free lemon cake and coffee for me

 Latte and ...

 ... porridge with Norfolk honey for Benedict.

 His response!

The Slipper Chapel, so called because pilgrims historically would divest themselves of their shoes and walk the last part of their pilgrimage, the Holy Mile, barefoot into Walsingham and to the now ruined remains of the priory.  Pilgrims still continue that form of penance.  Our friends including Dave and Pip walked this route but not barefoot!

 The farm shop quite literally across the road supplied us with plenty of local fruit and vegetables, gluten free snacks and treats aswell as staples of milk, cheese and preserves all sourced within the area:

 One basket of goodness and ...

 ... one delicious lunch.

I even managed to snatch some time on my own and enjoyed a ten minute saunter down the high street:

The last mass on the Monday was a mere handful of folk in the hundreds as opposed to the day before of 1800 when these pictures were taken.  That was the day the shrine cafe shut up shop early as it quite literally ran out of food!!  Pip and her friends attended a "children's church" workshop before the mass and enjoyed decorating some crowns as a visual reminder of the "crown of eternal life."

 

 Benedict and his "shadow" underneath the image of Don Bosco.