Our Summer Holiday in Woolacombe and thereabouts

For my birthday we had a nice summer break in Woolacombe where, on my birthday itself, I ran the Woolacombe half marathon.
We stayed at some holiday cottages nearby in Swimbridge called Hearson Cottages.

That's Nicky running up the hill for no reason

Yep, nearly at the top.

Haha, she's the king of the castle etc.... what to do now?

Charge down the hill of course

I was shattered but at least I got a fancy medal

Woolacombe is very nice...

The half marathon was great but really tough, it was quite undulating for the first 7 miles which really took it's toll and then at about 9 miles you had to run up steps for what seemed like an age as you came away from the coast.  It was looking like a sub two hour run at first but in the end I had to slow right down to a crawl to get up the hill and settled for 2hours and 14minutes.

The weather was a bit hit and miss, it didn't rain on my birthday but the next day was quite wet.  It didn't bother Oscar who was just happy to run around on the beach looking for shells and jelly fish.  He really liked Saunton beach.

We were close enough to pay a visit to Exmoor and the Exmoor Forest Inn in Simonsbath for lunch.

One of the highlights of staying at Lowerhearson was feeding time for the pigs, chickens and sheep.

We visited the odd town Clovelly, it is famous for it's steep decent into the port, donkeys and cobbles.

Oscar got really stubborn and wouldn't walk so I charged up the hill with him in the buggy, for some reason it seemed easier that going up slowly.

Charge!!!

Next to the cottages was a lovely little vineyard, we picked up a couple of bottles of Rose which was very pleasant.

One of the pigs had recently had piglets.

Despite the changeable weather we made one last trip to Woolacombe beach, the dogs and Oscar discovered running into the sea was fun and not scary.

On the way back from Woolacombe beach we followed the coast round Croyde and stopped off for some tasty take away from a seaside chippy... yum!
On the final morning Oscar said goodbye to the animals and off we went taking a scenic route through Exmoor via the Own and Hawk Centre.