I slept well until four, when the light woke me and I was too uncomfortable to get back to sleep. We left at nine and dropped back down to the village for a better look and couldn’t resist an early coffee, accompanied by the inevitable cake. We got close to a sedge warbler singing on a bush during a short walk along the coast, then we cycled up to Holt, a pretty Georgian town which was rebuilt after a fire destroyed most of the old town in 1708. The town is the terminus of the North Norfolk Railway on the former M&GNR line which fifty years ago could have taken us to Norwich. Not that we wanted anything to do with cities this holiday, we were in thrall to the delightful Norfolk countryside. However, Rowan and I took a trip on the railway to Sheringham and back while Christine wrote her postcards in the sunshine on the platform. We enjoyed lovely view from the window across the wheatfields to the coast.
Intensive map reading was required to get across the network of lanes to Neatishead on the western edge of the Broads. The big hazard around here isn’t motor traffic, it’s getting lost! We were tired by this time and Rowan and I didn’t fancy another night’s camping so we booked into a B&B for two nights. Accommodation is scarce and expensive in these parts, it cost £102 per night for the three of us in a very ordinary establishment. There are few youth hostels, none at all in the National Park. Those that do exist were booked up by school groups apart from Kings Lynn.
There were two places to eat in this small village so we tried the pub the first night, a basic meal but the Wherry ale was outstanding.