Shell Island

I went camping with my friends this weekend, to a fairly cheap campsite in North Wales called Shell Island. There were eight of us, and I had a really good time - the weather was ok most of the time, considering it's Britain, and I loved being in a place when I could just leave whenever I wanted. I honestly can't remember the last time I was alone (and awake) for more than thirty minutes, so one afternoon I left my shoes behind and took music with me and walked down the beach for what seemed like much less time than it apparently was.



I've been here a few times since I was about nine, and one of the things I always remember about it is this giant rock that looks a little bit like a dinosaur, then another large one a few yards across from it. I remember as a kid, my cousins and my friends and I separated into groups one night and sat on the two rocks, lay out stones and pebbles and shells and things in front of us and ran between the two, trading the stock from our "shops". At age twelve, two of my friends and I did the creepy "blood sisters" thing, making incisions in the side of our palms and stamping our wounds against the rock to make the vaguest smudge of blood. About a year and a half ago, my dad's drunken best friend fell off of it into the sea.

Another thing we did a lot this camping trip was walk along the tall sand dunes there are there, and I can't really explain how overwhelming it was to walk, pushing your body against the wind and feet through the sand, through the middle of the huge hills. You could tell how overwhelmed we all were, a group of excitable teenagers, because after sticking close together and chattering a lot of the way there everybody just split apart and walked in different directions. For once, everyone just dropped everything and sort of explored.





(all of the photos I used today are Alecia's )

I know this probably isn't the sort of place you write a "travel blog" about (I hope you know that's not what I was aiming for), but I felt like I needed to share Shell Island with you, just because I've revisited it so many times at different stages of my life. We were sat on a rock and Poppy was joking about how in later years, somebody would propose to me sat there. Despite all of the complications there are between us all sometimes, I really liked being with a big group of my friends outside of a school environment and making fires, dancing to "Bohemian Rhapsody" late at night, catching starfish and letting them go.