Sunshine at Reculver

The bright day tempted us out: we needed quick visits to the pharmacy and post office, then drove to north Kent to look at some used WAVs (wheelchair accessible vehicles). J needs to travel in her wheelchair, and these days, if we are to stay anywhere overnight, we will also need to transport her shower/commode chair; in future, we may decide the limited availability of accommodation supplying a hoist for transfers in and out of wheelchair and bed means that we will have to transport our own "portable" hoist as well. We quickly reached the sad conclusion that the medium-large cars I had looked at online would not suffice, and that only the seriously large models would meet our future travel needs. Not only are they expensive and heavy on fuel; they are also intimidatingly large in relation to our country lanes and the rather tight turn into our tree-lined driveway. It was useful to see the capacity of the various cars, although the message was not the one I wanted to hear. 

We continued to Reculver Towers, one of the best known landmarks on the north Kent coast. The towers are the remains of a church dating from the seventh century and originally part of a monastery. The towers were a twelfth century addition to what by then was the parish church; they were left standing in 1805, when most of the church was demolished and the stone used to rebuild it on higher ground. We didn't walk far, and the wind was chilly despite the sun, but we enjoyed hot drinks from our flasks on the sea wall and looked out over the Kentish Flats offshore wind farm, thirty tall turbines in the shallow water of the Thames estuary. I continued with my planned week of familiarising myself with my new phone camera, and learned that, unless I've missed something, it does not perform so well when I need to zoom into objects in a wide landscape; when I looked at today's photos at home, I wished I had used the DSLR. It's useful to know.