Fun on Jersey!

We’ve just returned from a fab family three day trip to Jersey, I had no idea our sister isle could provide so much fun for the children and megalithic joy for me!

We stayed in the hostel at Durrell’s, part of the Zoo complex, which meant that we also got free entry to the zoo. I can really recommend this place, quiet, incredibly clean, and just really easy with the children. It helped enormously that we were staying at the same time as a bunch of lovely ladies from the UK, one of whom was there to swim between Jersey and France, it took her just over 7 hours, amazing! One of the ladies is a yoga teacher so each morning they practiced together outside in the beautiful garden, me practicing on my own under a tree, all six of us enjoying the peace and tranquility.

As chance would have it, we were staying at the hostel at the exact same time as another home school mum and her two children. Eben especially was delighted for the play friends and the three of them ran feral, Elijah joining in from time to time, when he could be encouraged away from his iPad! Breakfast is also included in the cost of the accommodation and you do have the option to use the kitchen to prepare food as long as Durre'll’s don’t have a function on, I do highly recommend it for a family, as long as you don’t mind bunking it and sharing facilities (there’s plenty of communal toilets and showers).

As luck would have it, by staying at Durrell’s I was super close to two main dolmens, one of which, La Faldouet, I visited a couple of times as it is abolutely amazing, especially at night with the stars overhead and the enormous capstone glowing in the night air. Le Courperon is pretty potent too perched on the cliffs. I was lucky to get a whole hour to myself inside La Hougue Bie, which is said to be one of the ten oldest buildings in the world, built long before the Pyramids built to align perfectly with the equinox. It’s rather amazing!

We were visiting Jersey with our friend, Stu, and his two boys, their wife/mummy being my friend Marie-Noelle who died from cancer last September, Stu is from Jersey and was staying elsewhere, but we met up during the says and the boys had a lot of fun our first day at the zoo (the butterflies and pigs were a surprising hit, and the orang-utans too of course, oh and gorillas) and lunch and a swim at Rozel Bay and then fun was had at the water slides down at the Merton, albeit I made the most of that opportunity to leave the men and boys to it and head off to explore La Hougue Bie on my own, the joy of having the car!

The next day we headed to aMaizin Adventure Park, which was a real hit and we spent most of the day here in the end bar a trip to St opens for lunch, and I left them to it for a bit to find Monts Grantez dolmen on some National Trust land above St Ouens, which is an incredible dolmen, there is a side chamber that is phenomenal energetically. I was also lucky to get a swim in disorientating to be able to see Sark in the distance, because usually I’m on Sark seeing Jersey instead!

Back to the maze, well there is a maze, a maize one funnily enough, which is really impressive, albeit I admit to getting a bit bored by the end! The adventure park though has lots of other things, go-karts, bouncy things, tractor rides, mole hill, crazy golf, outdoor play and indoor play equipment, aerial runways etc etc, lots of things to keep them busily entertained, a definite highlight!

Our last day we spent just the four of us and visited the amazing (there was definitely an amazing theme to the trip!) charity shop at Durrell’s. I do love a charity shop and this one is spacious and filled with some cool stuff, well worth a visit if you are into them and all for a good cause too, for as much as I don’t like seeing animals in captivity, I do appreciate the work that Durrell’s do and just wish we lived in a world where a zoo is not required to protect endangered species in the first place and they could all live in the wild naturally.

I took the boys to see some of the dolmens and we went for a swim at high tide down at Bouley Bay. We did have a bit of a wasp drama was the only thing. Here on Guernsey, at least in St Andrews we have had a real fly problem this summer, which is being investigated by the authorities - those of you who have come here for a private session will be well aware of my efforts to keep the flies out of the healing space. Jersey has a wasp problem though, tons of wasps, and unfortunately Elijah got stung on the beach, and this sent the boys into quite a spin, so the whole beach were definitely aware of their fear of wasps and daddy was instructed to walk behind us with the food bag, which was funny at the time!

We also chanced upon an arboretum, up near the airport, established as a memorial to someone who died back in 1975. There are various trees from various parts of the world and with E as a tree man, he was keen to explore it more. It is a beautiful walk, we ended up doing all of it, around the reservoir, which probably ended up taking 1.5 hours in the end, if not a bit more, as we explored paths that took us off the main path, and we stopped at times to take in the trees, the Australian eucalyptus and the American red woods are especially amazing.

We found a really good place to eat, at least to cater to our needs, up in Trinity at the Trinity Arms, which offers some vegan options for those who avoid dairy. It has a play area too, which is always helpful! This all before our boat journey back to Guernsey, which was inevitably delayed, so we didn’t get home until 11.30pm, a little late, but all part of the adventure nonetheless and I’m sure we’ll eventually catch up on sleep but this summer is full on, non-stop activity, and while autumn is in the air, we should still have a few more weeks of being able to make the most of the sunshine.

Jersey is fab for the children though and for adults too actually, I saw it in a different light this time. I used to have to go to Jersey for work, and prior to that for studying, and prior to that for inter-island netball and volleyball games and partying, and prior to that for surfing so I have seen it from different perspectives, not all of them necessarily uplifting, I loathed the ICSA studying weekends especially! So it was really lovely to connect more with the land and its megalithic history, and to make positive memories with the various families.

More on the changing energy and things being up in the air to follow as we wane to the new moon on Saturday.

Love Emma x