An overview of June’s challenges. We discover a new country park, have lots of fun in the garden, get involved with insects, swim in the sea and get B wayfinding a country walk.

It’s all getting so much easier. After months of working hard to find challenges they’re now just rolling up to us ready made. The garden, always a great challenge provider, has found new ways to entertain us. Snail racing was a definite favourite, but I loved making a garden spa too (B got bored with the heavy lifting but liked the water fun). We’re also beginning to enjoy the fruits of earlier work, finding strawberries and raspberries and admiring the flowers B planted a few weeks ago.

We discovered a new place this month, Porthkerry Country Park. I don’t know why we had never been. There are other country parks near us and, for some reason, we tended to go to the ones we knew. Now we are obsessed. Two visits in two weeks and a blog just devoted to those. I’m sure there will be more too. It feels like we’ve only just scratched the surface. We did so many great things but my overwhelming favourite was our den in the woods. It was so SO much better than our feeble attempt on New Years Day.

Swimming in the sea has finally crept onto the agenda. I love this but B has to be persuaded… though once there she normally has a great time. We’re working on incentives. Throwing stones in the sea is never a bad time though. Only our second official stone challenge, we’re definitely going to do more of these in the next few months. We also did our second boat trip – a much posher one than the first, taking the Waverley to ‘the other side’.

The summer solstice needed to be marked and we opted for an evening at the beach (rather than getting up at 4am). A few days later the birds woke us up for the dawn though. We’ve had a lot of fun with birds as well as insects this month. Both providing a lot of entertainment and opportunities for interaction.

Finding a secret place felt like an inspiring moment this month. Both B and I agree we need to find more places like this, where you can hide and watch. We also revisited the Wayfinding challenges, with B having a go at finding the way on a new country walk.

Finally June also saw the first Trails, Bales and Snails Treasure Hunt of the summer. There are some more exciting ones to come at St Fagan’s National History Museum over the next few months.