Dover Bound

Due to the complete wash out of our beautiful North Eastern summer, we packed up our tourer and headed south to warmer clim's. An exciting day dawned with adventure and travel laying just around every roundabout and service station.

You may be right in asking why Dover?  There are two reasons for this; The first being it is a probably as far south as we could get without adding a few illegal immigrants to our entourage and the second reason being  Dover is home to a lovely segment of our family.

A long drive ensued down the 300 miles of the A1 & A14 motorway and an even longer crawl along the 26 miles of the M11. Arriving through no fault of our own 14 hrs later. One very tired dad, one exhausted mum and one frustrated me.

We arrived at the hawthorn farm camping &caravan site at 8:30pm situated just outside Dover on the road to Deal at a place called Martin  Mill the site was very busy with weekend campers, the staff were very helpful and found us a plot for the night.There's a small cafe on site and they very kindly cooked us a meal of fish n chips of which we were very grateful .The cafe was accessible to wheelchairs and the staff were very helpful, the cafe housed a small shop offering bread ,milk etc.   

Next morning dad moved the caravan to a different plot as a lot  of  people had moved on to catch ferries or move on to other destinations. The plots are on a first come first served basis as traffic moves to and from Europe and can be very busy at weekends although it did calm down during the week.

Flat and Spacious

The caravan site has good facilities, with a good shower room and toilet, wet room, with drain away system rather than stepping in the shower. Although my experience was a dry one due to a spitting shower head attacking my dad rather than showering me. The room itself was great with lots of space and some additional seating for comfort.

Overall Deal was a very accessible place, nice and flat, great for wheelchairs with lots of open space. Unfortunatley disabled toilets were limited and not situated in best positions, there was however one in the cafe at the end of the pier. Other than that though you had to venture into town center, or use the rather dirty one in the bus depot.

Sea Wall

Prone to flooding Deal does have a sea wall, there are places to get over these walls, but the council didn't see fit to locate the disabled parking bays next to them. These parking bays also need attention, you cant just change the colour of the lines to yellow and call it suitable for disabilities, how do we get in and out?

Disabled Parking Bay

                                                                                                                                                                                   

Overall Deal is a lovely place to visit due to the endless flats which need little to no effort to move a wheelchair. It is however quiet with little in the way of excitement but a lovely quaint seaside resort none the less.