The conditions were right once again tonight so we headed back out with our friends, the Molloys, to try our luck again. This time we went to Aberavon as the algae had been seen there the previous 4 nights.
Around midnight we started to see some light when we splashed in the water. The water was really warm and was full of people.
The light looked more white to our eyes but the cameras were showing the vivid blue.
I’ve been away camping most weekends recently so this week was a massive social event where I caught up with nearly all my friends:
I went with daddy to the dentist today. He had one wisdom tooth removed and he had a filling. We got to take his tooth home, it has a filling in it. Fillings are metal that fill up a hole in the tooth to stop it getting damaged by decay. Eating sugary foods can cause decay.
Not everyone has wisdom teeth. They don’t arrive with the normal adult teeth, instead they start coming through when the person is between the ages of 17-21.
After had cut several glass bottles into tubes, daddy was washing them again and he discovered a new musical instrument.
When you have two glass tubes (open both ends) in a bowl of water, if you clink them together gently whilst lifting one up, you get an amazing whooshing sound that goes up in pitch. It was so cool, we spent ages playing around making different sounds.
We’re experiencing a heatwave at the moment. My friends came over to play in our paddling pools and daddy created some special bubble mixture to make enormous bubbles. He made a special tool using two bits of bamboo for handles with thick rope tied between them to form a circle.
We took turns to blow enormous bubbles, it was so much fun. We learnt that the mixture seemed to get stronger after it had been left to settle. The first bubbles we made popped almost straight away.
Daddy and I have been doing lots of science experiements recently. Today we tried out our glass cutter.
We washed some bottles and then used the machine to score a line around each bottles circumference (the distance all the way around the bottle).
Next we slowly poured very cold water onto the score mark, whilst turning the bottle, then we poured boiling water over it, still whilst rotating the bottle. After a few go’s of hot and cold the bottle just falls apart at the score line.
We took our campers to Milton Keynes and Leighton Buzzard.
On the way to Milton Keynes, we stopped for a snack and a stroll at Faringdon Folly Tower. The Tower itself was covered by scaffolding and plastic sheeting but we walked up to it anyway and discovered a fairy village, complete with a full size piano! Naturally, we had a quick play.
Milton Keynes is an unusual city as it was built from plans in 1967. Usually cities evolve over time around a port or river. Milton Keynes was designed and built which makes it unlike any other city I have been visited.
There is no High Street, no main square, no old churches or cathedrals. All the roads are straight, like a grid pattern. I’ve learnt that this is how most American cities are built.
We did lots of exploring on foot and on our bicycles. The city is extremely good for cyclists and pedestrians as there are tunnels and bridges across all the roads and there are loads of parks and playgrounds.
We also spent an afternoon in Gullivers Land Theme Park, I enjoyed the log flume and the ball pit the best.
We went out late last night to a beach on the Gower in the hope of seeing bioluminescent algae.
The Gower coast is a good spot for seeing this natural phenomenon. It happens very late at night, it needs to be very dark with no artificial lighting. When the tide comes in it brings the algae with it. If you then disturb the water you can see lots of lots of blue luminous light.
Sadly, the only thing we found on the beach was a lot of dead fish. They all had the same strange slice missing from the side of their body. We wonder if they had been caught by a propellor on a boat.
Although we didn’t see what we hoped, it was still a fun evening as we went with another home ed family and we all enjoyed playing on the beach until the early hours.
I’ve been working my way through a Maths and English workbook during our camping trips.
This year we had 6 baby moorhens on our pond. We haven’t seen them for a few days so we suspect they have been picked off by the heron. That’s how the circle of life goes.
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