Messing about in the River

For once the May Bank Holiday was gloriously sunny, in fact the whole weekend has been lovely weather which really does make a change British Bank Holidays are notoriously WET!

Saturday being Mikeys 6th birthday we spent the day opening presents eating cake and making up Lego.

Sunday we headed out with the cousins to Elvaston Castle.

We had a lovely day riding our bikes around the grounds, Elvaston Castle is a beautiful place. Keeping all 7 children entertained was somewhat of a challenge with only 5 bikes, which meant someone always was left behind!

But we managed to have a lovely day filled with ice cream and kite flying.

Then on Monday we headed for a walk down the river.

The sun shone and the temperature soared.

We had so much fun skimming stones, and paddling in the water.

Their is a lovely shallow weir too which the children thought was great being able to slide down the flowing water.

But then the fun ended as I dropped my faithful little camera into the water as I reached out to grab Chloe as she swooshed passed to prevent her going into the deeper river section.

I plucked it out of the river and quickly removed the battery and memory card and hoped for the best.

We dried ourselves and headed back to the park for a bit leaving my camera to dry out in the sun.

When we got home I tried the memory card in the card reader of my computer but it didn't read, I was gutted that I might have lost the photos and had little faith in the camera suddenly springing back to life.

My friends on facebook suggested leaving the camera and memory card in a bowl of rice for a few days, which I did. Thankfully this morning the memory card is working again, the camera however is still not coming on at all.

Being without a camera is like loosing my left arm! The camera I dropped was a little Olympus point and shoot camera which I got a couple of years ago for my birthday, it is a lovely little camera and I get some cracking photos on it, but I had been debating getting another camera for a while anyway.

So yesterday I looked through the offers in Argos and decided to treat myself to the Nikon CoolPix L810  Bridge camera.

It may be one of the simplest bridge cameras available but budget doesn't stretch to much more right now, Nikon gets great reviews plus it has a super zoom and from what I have seen so far I am impressed!

Here are a few photos I have taken so far just testing it out.