Jodie Alice Fisher A personal blog from the heart of a young Mum
It’s become a little bit of a tradition for our family to visit the Isle Of Wight each year. Whether that’s with our tribe, with my in-laws, or even the extended-in-laws too. It’s a place of blissful memories and quite rapidly became our top travel destination since 2016! Although Orlando would be a close contender if it wasn’t so expensive and far to get to!
My mother-in-law had booked our summer getaway quite early on in the year, it certainly gave us hope and something to look forward to. There were times when we became quite worried that the trip wasn’t going to happen - Freya was told to isolate due to close contact and a lot of Eva’s class were testing positive after a party but thankfully this didn’t affect our plans.
For our last Isle Of Wight summer trip, we booked a stay at a hotel local to the ferry terminal. This time we were travelling with not only my mother-in-law but also my Grandparents-in-law and Uncle-in-law. So to reduce possible contact we decided to travel down in the morning.
Can we just take a second to talk about packing… I always tell myself I won’t overpack, that I’ll take the bare minimum, then boom the whole car gets filled and I have no leg space at all! Oh well… i’ll try again next time!
We love to travel with Wightlink Ferries. We’ve never experienced any issues with them. The ferry takes about 45 minutes to cross which always feels like just enough time to grab a snack and go to the toilet, then it’s time to get back in the car!
Our little family suffers a little from travel sickness so we always make sure to take some medication but it’s rare that you feel the waves. Only this time we happened to be crossing on one of the windiest days! One of the Wightlink staff members said “it’s going to be a rocky one!” which worried me. Thankfully it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting it to be and we all arrived on the island in one piece.
Check-in for our holiday accommodation wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon. We arrived just before midday and decided to head straight for a beach. There’s plenty of beaches to choose from considering the Isle Of Wight is a small island off the South of England.
We opted for St Helen’s Duver. This beach is East of the island, has free public toilets, a little cafe, a National Trust car park and also a normal car park too. It’s a great beach for rock pooling and the tide comes in quite flat with no massive gradients so it’s a great location for families.
The weather was pretty horrific in terms of the wind. It was so strong it felt like it would lift us off our feet. That didn’t seem to bother the children too much though as they were just so thrilled to be back on the island and visiting a beach. I’m pretty sure we only ever seem to go to the beach when we go to the Isle Of Wight.
After some time exploring the rocks, digging holes, splashing along the shore, and being blown away in all directions, we decided to go in search of some food. There are hundreds of brilliant restaurants and local businesses to choose from which I’m sure I’ll cover in some of our other Isle Of Wight posts, but our first meal of choice was a reliable KFC. My favourite!
There are two KFC restaurants on the island. One in Newport and one in Sandown near the Premier Inn we stayed in for our Christmas break. We chose the Newport restaurant as this was sort of on our way to our holiday home. We managed to grab a table that seated 8 people (the rest of the in-laws were joining us later in the afternoon) and we all enjoyed a big family share bucket to fill our tummies!
After our late lunch, it was the perfect time to head for our holiday home. Probably the most exciting part of a holiday for me, arriving at a new place to call home and pretend is yours. Especially when it’s as glorious as the converted barn we had booked!
We’ve stayed at Kemphill Farm a few times. It’s in a great location North-East of the island. There are three barns to choose from, all sleeping 10-12 guests. The barns are surrounded by beautiful countryside. We’ve always been very impressed with the facilities. I filmed a house tour of the Old Dairy we stayed in if you’d like to check that out.
The girls didn’t take long to spread out their toys, Elsa got stuck into some watercolour painting and the other two ran around crazy with their Uncle (who’s 10 by the way). We even got all the kiddies involved in bringing in our food shop delivery - the quickest it’s ever been unloaded I reckon!
Do you unpack your clothes and belongings for a holiday? I do. So that was my task for the rest of the afternoon. I love to feel like I’m living a different life from normal.
We welcomed the rest of our holiday gang in the afternoon and spent the evening catching up. We hadn’t seen my husbands’ Nan and Grandad or Uncle for the entire pandemic so it felt so special to be surrounded by family again after so long.
Our holiday was a total of 8 days, 7 nights, so I have plenty of fun things to share with you in the coming weeks. I hope you enjoy our new Isle Of Wight holiday series! All videos are already live on my YouTube channel or you can have a watch here:
