Easter Sunday 2016

Now that our company is gone and we're finished with travels until summer vacation, it's time to wrap up our Easter weekend tour of the south coast with a final blog post about Easter Sunday.

The weather all weekend was crap - intermittent rain bands heralded in by sustained winds of around 25-30 mph that gusted up to 40 quite often. This picture pretty much sums up the state of things. The air temp was in the low 50s, but it felt much colder thanks to the whipping winds.

We started out the morning with breakfast at our B&B. Then we drove to the Isle of Portland, just southwest of Weymouth where we were staying. While there, we stopped to check out some very rough seas and one of the lighthouses.

Below is the view from the daughter's room on the third floor of the B&B, looking out over the tops of houses to the water, in-between rain showers.

After returning to the B&B to gather up our gear, we drove west along the coast to Charmouth. I had tried to book a private three hour fossil hunting guide, but he was unavailable on Sunday - understandable since it was Easter. So I opted to sign us up for a two hour group fossil hunting walk with the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre. While we were hearing the initial spiel inside the centre from the resident palaeontologist, it was raining buckets. By the time we bought our £1 fossil guide booklet and were ready to go, the rain had passed. We headed off with our guided group to the rock and pebble beach to get down to the business of finding and attempting to identify fossils that are millions of years old.

Needle in a haystack, you say? Sorta. We all adopted the same approach of parking it on a big rock, then sifting in the rocks all around us. We found some lovely examples like the one you see below. Plus a lot of beach glass. I definitely want to return at some point for a bit more fossil hunting in better weather. Maybe hit the beach at nearby Lyme Regis, too, since they're also good fossil hunting grounds. We got splattered with some sprinkles while on the beach, but nothing too bad. As we looked out to sea, we could see where the rain was headed and were just glad it wasn't directly over us.

We wrapped up our Easter Sunday with fish and chips at a local place in Weymouth along the harbour. It was a nontraditional holiday weekend spent on the road touring some of our adopted country and we enjoyed the experience.