Visiting Guernsey

We had decided a long time ago that Guernsey was a place we really wanted to visit, so when it opened up again around the time we were booking our honeymoon it seemed like it was meant to be.  The fact that it was so close and we could take a ferry instead of flying was also bonus.  

We stayed in a shepherd hut at Camp de Reves, found by my husband, and it was perfect.  Just the right size (which also gave us an idea about the type of place we'd like to live in in the future), with a great view of the sea, perfect location for visiting all the sites we wanted to go to, and a lovely amount of privacy.

Our main aim of this trip was to relax and enjoy ourselves, but we did want to see the history of the island, get in as much walking as possible, and look at any crafting that was still happening there (this last one was mostly for me).  We went out most days, apart from the day I developed a nasty cold, but didn't cram any of them even though we probably could have seen everything in three days had we been inclined.  

Despite most of the things you hear about Guernsey being related to WWII, there's actually quite a bit of Napoleonic and prehistoric history there as well and we tried to see as much of the prehistory as we could.  They were mostly burial chambers that you could go into and I always find them fascinating.  It helped that everything was pretty easy to get to and it really didn't take long to drive anywhere - and by that I mean 30 minutes at the most, even with traffic.

In the week we were there we did manage to see a lot of monuments and historic structures.  However, my favourite part was the two walks we did along the south coast of the island.  Despite being so close to a built up areas, it was very peaceful and lacking in human noise.  The views out to sea were also very beautiful and quite a few of the plants were flowering.

There wasn't as much crafting to see as I had hoped, despite there being a 5 ply wool yarn that is a Guernsey specific wool and a specific style of jumper.  I did manage to get some of this wool though and the pattern for the jumper which I'm going to make for my husband.  I did also buy a hand woven basket that had been made locally and that I'm going to put my knitting projects into.  I could even use it to carry them around whilst knitting if I ever get the urge.  It's absolutely beautiful and I can see it lasting for years.

The good things about visiting Guernsey were how easy is was to get around and how quickly you could get to places even with a speed limit of 35 mph everywhere.  It also has a much slower pace so it was a lot easier to relax into our holiday, and everyone was very helpful when we had questions about things.  The food was also pretty good, even on the plant based front and that's usually where things can be a bit hit or miss.

There are always a couple of bad things no matter where you go and at Guernsey it was the cost of everything, which was a little bit more than on the mainland.  However, we were expecting that so it wasn't too much of a problem as we'd gone prepared.  There also wasn't as much wildlife as I had hoped, even a long the coastline.  To be fair, it was only April and the size of the island means that every available space is pretty much used up by humans so there aren't too many places wildlife can go.  However, I had hoped for a little bit more marine wildlife, but oh well.

Even with these couple of bad things we still really enjoyed our time in Guernsey, helped by the amazing weather we had, and we'd like to go back again at some point.  In fact, we enjoyed it so much we started talking about the possibility of actually moving there to live.  Right now we definitely don't have enough money to do that, but you never know there could be a moving to Guernsey blog in the future.