By: Blonde Two

After hill walking, my second favourite moving around activity is swimming.  This weekend was another Dartmoor overnighter for the Two Blondes and I knew that we were going to be camping by a lovely river with a very tempting swimming hole.  What better opportunity to combine my two loves.  I can’t possibly give away the secrets of our exact location but it was on the North moor and there were two cuckoos “cuck” and “ooing” at each other near by.

Swimming Hole

The first time we camped at this spot was a couple of years ago and, as this weekend, we arrived with 18 youngsters, some tents and some nice cheese to eat.  For the first visit, the weather was balmy and the sun shone all day.  It was a waiting around kind of day so some of the kids choose to swim.  I desperately wanted to but had no swimwear and couldn’t face the chance of being caught in my undies by the young ones.

This year, I arrived with strong resolve, a micro towel and my bikini.  The only thing that I forgot was to order the sunshine.  It was not a particularly cold day but there was a breeze and wrapping up was more tempting than stripping off.  Some kids had set off, only for some of them to come back again almost straight away (it was that kind of a day).  I could feel my swimming resolve slipping and the privacy levels slipping as the morning went on but I knew deep down that I would have been disappointed with myself if I didn’t take a dip so I decided to sneak off with my towel and dip a toe in.

The toe dip didn’t deter me (it maybe should have done) so I found a rock to sit on as the grass in the area was full of ticks, and stripped off to my bikini.  The water was so cold as I slid in that I thought that I wasn’t going to be able to take a breath.  I swam about three strokes over to a waterfall, keeping my head above water to avoid “ice-cream head” (or sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia to give it the correct name) and then back again.  Within a couple of minutes, I was back on my rock attempting a discreet change and realising exactly how micro a micro towel really is!

It was a really lovely spot, deep enough for me not to touch the bottom and if I ever manage to see sunshine there again, I will definitely give it another try!