Walking and Eating

Today mostly consisted of walking and eating.
With some fabulous bird watching thrown in!
We drove in Nana and Papa's van to Clay next the Sea (or "Cly" as I learnt it's pronounced!). On the way as we drove along beside the reeds and salt marshes we had an amazing sighting of a Barn owl sitting on a fence post. Papa pulled over and I got out with the Little Misses to get a closer look. Amazing! As we carried on driving along, it kept flying from post to post keeping up with us! What a treat, I said to the Little Misses, you never see owls like that during the day time.
Turned out I was completely wrong and North Norfolk is stuffed to the gunnels with owls!!! But I'm getting ahead of myself.
We parked in the car park at Clay and had a quick walk round the village and the windmill (which has been converted into a lovely hotel and restaurant and has definitely gone on to my list of places I want to stay!) before getting down to more important matters and heading to the Clay Smokehouse for some crab pate, and then to the fabulous deli Picnic Fayre for more essential provisions.
Oh my goodness what an amazing place!!!! It was so hard to choose what to have!!
I had the most delicious pork pie I have ever eaten (From Bray's Cottage who I am delighted to discover send pies in the post!!!), Mr K had a bacon and chicken pie which was wonderful, my mum had a pear and Norfolk cheese tart, my dad had the biggest slice of Victoria sponge cake I have ever seen (but which was amazingly moist as I can personally testify!), Miss L had a sausage roll and hunks of fresh sourdough bread, and Miss L had a massive tub of olives and garlic.
We ate all our goodies on a bench overlooking the reed beds where they were cutting the reeds and bundling them up for thatching. Amazing to think they've been doing more or less the same thing for thousands of years. 
Then we set off on a walk out into the salt marshes along the path leading to Blakeney. What a walk!!! So many birds - egrets, curlews, flocks of geese, lots of waders I can't identify, a Marsh Harrier and, most stunning of all, a Barn Owl hunting incredibly close to us. We could see it clearly enough with the naked eye but the binoculars made it even better.
And then, when we thought it couldn't get any better, it had a spat with a Marsh Harrier who plunged to try and take its catch from it while it was on the ground.
Just bloody brilliant!!!!
And there was also delicious cake and hot chocolate at the Muddy Dog Tearoom in Blakeney. Because we really didn't eat enough in Clay!!!
We didn't need dinner tonight. But I did finish Miss E's sausage roll from the deli. Yum!