Campingninja Blog

Since the video of me cooking the scrambled eggs went live, some of the campsite have been flocking over to our pitch at dinner times to see me as the chef at work. It seems that everyone wants a piece of the action, or a piece of whatever I'm cooking. Some of the other campers, ants, bumblebees and even some of the cows too, have been appearing out of nowhere at our camp within seconds of the saucepan coming out. One couple from one of the trailer tents have been lurking in the bushes trying to get a look in too. It's like I have more kudos in the kitchen than Delia and Nigella together!

But tonight was the head chefs night off and we went out for dinner.

I got really excited at the buffet when I thought I'd seen my favourite, sweet and sour chicken balls. Although sadly as it turns out and as I found out when I bit into them, it was in fact carrot tempura. Bleuk!! If only I'd read the label first!

Carrot tempura, you either love it or you hate it!

With a lock in courtesy of the cows, I thought that it's probably a good idea for me to send a few postcards to let people know where I am. Plus, by way of tradition, I always write a postcard to my Ninja Grand Papa in the ancient ninja language of Ninjaaa (because that's all he understands these days).

D<<a* N**n^ Gr@n@ @ap*,

@aving a lov>ly time a@ay c*mping, but can you gu*ss wh*re I*m sta><>ing on my ho*d*@? @@ere are some lues@

I s*i*f t*@ air and turn to *y rig<t, a*d *a@e a dee> *re@@th, I *an the sm**ll of the fa>m just ne@t @oor.

W*e@ I loo* ahead, with big e*es, I*>e<m tea in fro*t of me. Um*m, yu*m@! 

*he m*p@@ing Ni@<:a

For those of you who don't speak Ninjaaa yet, this is what it says...

Dear Ninja Grand Papa,

Having a lovely time away camping, but can you guess where I'm staying on my holiday? Here are some clues...

If I sniff the air and turn to my right and take a deep breath, I can the smell the farm just next door.

When I look ahead, with big eyes, I lick my lips at the sight of the delicious cream tea in front of me. Ummm, yummy!

If I turn to the left I can see the sea in the distance. If you're imagining me running on the beach with the sand tickling in between my little ninja toes you'd be on the right track.

And when I spin right around to see what's behind me, there are stunning views of rolling fields and an old favourite, familiar tent of mine pitched in the middle.

There's only one place I can be. Camping in Devon! One of the many special places that make Great Britain so great.

Wish you were here. No actually I don't, as I still haven't got over the last time we went camping together and you trod in a cowpat and left your shoes next to my bed all night, but if you were staying in one of the caravans in another field, then that would be OK.

Lots of love,

The Camping Ninja 

You might think that after spending a month camping together with the same 3 other people and the same old tents, that maybe we would be getting bored of each other by now and possibly even running out of things to do. But no way!! There's always something fun to do when you're camping, even when you are stranded and blocked in by cows.

Luckily we saved one of the best for moments like this. Sleeping bag races!

Remember like the sack races on sports days when you were at school? This is the grown up version and even better!

Must go now though to prepare for heat 1, me against Elwood. Only 2 minutes left to place your bets and I'd like to remind you that I'm 99.7% pure Camping Ninja thoroughbred so I should be fast at this 25 metre sleeping bag dash event. Very, very fast indeed!

Similarly to people being stranded on their holidays due to the ash cloud, cancelled flights or travel companies going bust, you may not expect it to happen in quite the same, one in a million, back of the mind chances like you would with a holiday overseas, but the same can happen when you're camping too.

We were due to travel back home yesterday afternoon but due to a rare breed, herd of cows with a national protection order preventing anyone from moving them, blocking the only exit road out of the little village where the campsite we're staying at is, we're unable to leave, until the cows decide to do so of their own will. Definitely not moo hoo for me - I am very happy about it!

The tricky thing now though is having to call work on a Monday morning and tell them that after taking a month off for a camping holiday in the UK, you're not going to be able to make it back in for possibly another week, or two even, because of the whim of some Devonshire cows!

Eric, who was too embarrassed to tell his work that he was going camping anyway, braves the phone first. He makes up this hugely unbelievable, long, garrulous story about how his plane was diverted to a desert island on the way home and that now he's marooned there, stranded in the middle of the ocean and growing a beard.

The gritty details are shocking, as is the amount of detail he goes into and 35 minutes later when he ends the call, his made up story is strangely more believable than the true one I'm about to tell when I call my work. Because quite frankly, who's going to believe you when you tell them you're stuck on your holiday because you can't get past a few cows?!!

We moved on from our campsite this afternoon and after having driven for a couple of hours en route to our next campsite, we had the conversation about whether or not anybody had remembered packing Eric's bed into the boot. No one had. We'd accidentally left the bed on the roof of the ninja wagon and driven off!

With the bed long gone and after a long journey of Eric fretting about having to sleep on one of the roll mats, thinking that it was going to be like sleeping on a rock, we arrived at our new campsite.

Night was drawing in and the bed fiasco still very much remained a fiasco! So we set up to play a quick game of short straws and stick (because we didn't have quite enough straws in the camping kit for one each) to settle it fair and square and see who would get the comfiest blow up camping bed tonight and for the rest of our stay, and who would be the less fortunate ones with the roll mats...

A full moon and a hooting owl. Lucky for some ninja's I thought, but would I be one of them? Only time would tell. The last straw was drawn. The straws compared. Moments of tension, followed by further moments of tension. But yes, I'd got it, the longest straw! This little Camping Ninja had won his right to sleep on the air bed, fair and square.

A classic ninja celebration followed - me dancing the traditional ninja two step. It wasn't very fancy or sophisticated but I wasn't worried. The air bed was mine and the roll mats were for the others.

As I snuggled up comfortably on my air bed to sleep, looking out through the tent window and watching the stars twinkling in the night sky, the shadow of the lucky hooting owl passed over the shape of the glowing, full moon. An eclipse of ninja good fortune.

And then off to sleep. Zzz.

We're all off to the beach today for a spot of amateur surfing. Should be interesting, as none of us have ever been surfing before, or let alone, have the ability to balance on anything remotely resembling a board, since the skateboard incident back in 2003.

We arrive at the beach car park, windows wide open, the Beach Boys blaring out of the car stereo and the four of us singing along with our own holiday version of the lyrics 'everybody loves surfing, surfing Devon-bay'! Rather embarrassingly we happen to park amongst a bunch of local surfing pros. Try to unload the surfboards from the back of the ninja wagon without looking too stupid, but even that's a tough job as I manage to manoeuvre my board into the path of some other beach goers, almost puncturing one of their lilos! A sharp reminder that I'm much more adept in the sea with a lilo and why on earth we didn't bring our blow up air beds instead? Unconvincingly we attempt to cover up our inadequacies by referring to each other 'Dude'!

First challenge is navigating our way down to the beach, whispering to each other 'which way is it?' followed by a loud 'DUDE' at the end of every sentence. Not wanting to appear like sheep, we decide not to follow all the others down the main path to the beach, and instead make our own way there via a long, steep and painfully rocky non-path.

Fortunately when we eventually do touch down on the sand, there's a clever little sign pointing to the sea entrance. Most probably put there for people like us! Surfing, off we go... wish me luck!