19th Trip Golden Sands, Mabethorpe, Lincs. Haven Holiday Park
6th – 11th October 2008
Golden Sands is a Haven Holiday Park in Mablethorpe with touring
facilities just 1.5 miles (5 minutes) up the road from
Shamrock
Nurseries where we stayed the night before. It was nice not having
endured the 3 hour journey that morning as we were guided onto our pitch
number 14 by the site warden. I noticed that our caravan door was right
by a muddy puddle on a patch of ground obviously previously used by
caravanners with awnings so I asked if we could move. I checked the
neighbouring pitches and found that pitches 24 & 25 didn't have mud
patches caused by awnings. We settled on pitch 24.
Again, this site will not be everyone's cup of tea but like
Rockley
Park, we were not here for the entertainment. We were here because it
was a cheap pitch with EHU and at £23 for 5 nights (£4.60 per night!) we
weren't complaining! Granted it was October and so the site wasn't full
by any means. It was therefore no different to a CC or C&CC 5-van site
in a large field. We could visualise how packed it could be at the
height of Summer though. (It did start to fill up a bit with a few new
arrivals on the Friday night) We could also understand why there were so many
poor reports about it on
ukcampsite reviews, the touring area being a
good mile to walk to the entertainment facilities but as already
mentioned, we knew this wasn't going to bother us. No spectacular views
though (unless you count the Wind Farm) and if I was honest, I would
rather have gone back to Shamrock Nurseries but that would have meant
our 6 nights away would have cost us £83 instead of £33.
We took a drive round the private and holiday home statics to see what
the rest of the site was like. It's true what they say - Golden Sands is
"the poor family's holiday resort". It was looking very tired and in
need of several repairs to fences, roads, pathways and pitches to bring
it up to date again. I certainly wouldn't want to own a holiday home
there.
One thing I did notice with both Rockley Park and Golden Sands was that
nearly all of the pitches had large muddy oblongs next to them with
hardly any grass left growing. This ruins it for
those who don't use awnings and I saw a few other caravanners, also
without awnings, having a moan about this. Why, oh why can't Haven set
aside an area of the field for caravanners who don't use awnings?
Would we go back again? Probably not. Whilst there was nothing wrong
with the cheap pitch at Golden Sands, we would rather pay the extra at
Shamrock Nurseries or some other CL locally. It was a good break
nonetheless with some lovely walks. We visited The Seal Sanctuary
at the end of the road and spent a fun few hours in Skegness.
A 360 degree view of a part of the
park below.
Click your mouse in the image and scroll left, right,
up and down to view. Shift to zoom in and Ctrl to zoom out.
