Nothing here required an early start or a packed timetable. The best bits usually happened while we were supposed to be heading home.
Our red kite had spent two trips behaving like a determined umbrella. We shortened its tail, untangled the bridle, and tried again on a quiet stretch of beach. This time it held its shape overhead long enough for everyone to stop giving instructions. The children took turns with the reel; I stood nearby holding an entirely unnecessary bag of spare tape. On the way home, we talked about those few minutes as though we had crossed an ocean.
We set out for a proper long walk and made it hardly any distance before finding a grey pebble with a white line all the way around it. That became a search for stripes, then for circles, then for a stone that looked like a sleeping potato. We left the finds in a little arrangement on the sand and took a drawing home instead. It has a large arrow pointing to the potato, because apparently that part was important.
A wet Sunday turned into tail-making day. We cut strips from an old paper bag, coloured them blue, and argued amiably about the spacing between the bows. The table was still covered at lunchtime, so we ate soup at one end and let the glue dry at the other. By evening we had one repaired kite, several paper scraps stuck to our socks, and a notebook page headed “Things that worked indoors.”
Follow the string back to the bench