To celebrate the birthdays of The Bison and Lummox, a bike ride was planned in the New Forest. To save on drink driving bans and possible A road carnage, it was decreed that we should camp here, after the bike ride and refreshments.
It was a lovely time - we arrived at around lunchtime and as the campground doesn't like large groups we tried to arrive separately, so as not to arouse suspicion. Naturally, six of us turned up in a three car convoy to book in all at once. I couldn't resist loud 'hello!'s and hearty handshakes with The Bison and PC BMX Bandit while Rolfy cringed in the car and hissed 'We're not supposed to know them'. Thankfully the kindly Park Rangers didn't throw us out on our ears and let us carry on about our business after we'd paid the required Ayrton Senna for the 1 night stay.
A lovely time was had by all, with the only downer being that the staff of just one pub and the people who ran the campsite, were the only people in the entire New Forest that we met who had even the slightest scintilla of an idea of customer service. The man who ran the place where we hired the bikes was such a total and utter waste of skin and oxygen that it pains me to compare him to excrement, because even that has a function, however - even if he had rotted for many years (like his teeth had seemed to) I wouldn't even use this man as fertilizer in case I got bad tempered roses. Just in case you stumble across this blog and, even more fantastically unlikely, you have bothered to read this far and (really pushing the envelope of possibility here) you are thinking of hiring a bike in the New Forest.... Don't hire a bike here... the shop is on just off the road between Lyndhurst and Brokenhurst, the man who owns the place is a pretty unacommodating and unhelpful ass. The staff at the Crown Stirrup Pub were pretty off-hand and idiotic too, when they managed to deliver one of the meals we ordered about 15 minutes after they'd served the rest of us, they didn't offer an apology and thought it was funny to make light of the fact we'd waited. Useless country chavs. However - compared to the Brokenhurst Bike Bloke, they were a tolerable nusiance, I suppose. Like the black death.
Apart from these examples of lamentable customer service - we really did have a nice time and it was cracking to see everyone. Moreover it was delightful to have a coffee and a chat in the morning, just before it rained cats and dogs while we stuck camp and took the bikes back to the bearded tosspot who rented them to us.
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