One of the reasons Grizzly and Polar booked their little holiday in Hampshire was to see some of their family, who they haven't been able to visit all year, due to the nasty virus. On the very wet day, we went to see Polar's dad, to celebrate his 91st birthday.
Luckily, the next day was sunny and warm, as we had arranged to meet Grizzly's daughter, son-in-law and grandcubs for a picnic, at a very special place.
We drove along one of Grizzly's favourite roads, the A272, to a place a little way east of Billingshurst called Knepp, which is a big country estate that's being allowed to go completely wild. Humans can visit, and the grandcubs and their parents often do, but they must stick to certain paths and not go into areas that are just for animals.
We first heard about it from Mr Chris Packham on Springwatch, because there were storks nesting there, something that has not happened in England for hundreds of years. We hoped we might see a stork on our walk, as we were going to be following the 'yellow' trail which passes close to their tree.
Soon after meeting the cubs and their mum and dad in the car park, and starting our walk around the 'yellow' trail, we saw a herd of fallow deer. They were all stags and had very fine antlers. The cubs were delighted to see them. They love animals and have been collecting models of all sorts of different ones, which we hope to see when we can visit again.
A little further on, there was a platform high up in a big tree that we could climb up to via some wooden steps, with enough space for all the humans to be safely spaced. The smaller bears loved being high up in the tree but I am quite a nervous bear, and stayed near Grizzly on the central trunk.
Soon afterward, as we were making our way across some fields, Mr Rob (the cubs' dad) saw a flock of bird off to our right. At first, he and Polar thought they were seagulls but when Polar looked through the zoom lens of her camera, she saw that they were storks!
Grizzly, who has very good distance vision and some binoculars, counted twenty-two of them! We were delighted as we had only expected to see one or two, if we were very lucky. They were soaring up very high on the thermals, like kites and buzzards do. Polar said she thought they were exercising ready for their migration to Africa for the winter.
There were no storks left in the nest tree when we reached it, but by then all the humans had walked rather a long way and the smaller ones were feeling hungry. We found a picnic spot where we could put our rugs down close enough to talk to each other, and settled down to have cheese scones and cake!
We would have liked to give the cubs hugs and we know they wanted to hug their grandad, but their mummy was being extra safe, so we did wavy paws and enjoyed just seeing each other again.
We still had a long way to walk back to the car, through some woods and across fields, with lovely views back to the South Downs. The cubs' mummy said there was another lovely walk on the other side of the estate that went to a ruined castle, which sounded very exciting.
But by now, the human cubs had achy back paws. They might have managed to climb into another tree house, but their daddy saw there was a big wasps' nest underneath the platform, so we didn't go up there!
Near the way out, we saw an archway made of antlers. We all had sad ears, thinking that they were from deer who had died, but Polar explained that stags drop their antlers at the end of the year and grow new, bigger ones the following year. That made us more cheerful.
When it was time to wave goodbye, we all said we would love to visit again, and perhaps do the castle walk next time.
'Maybe small bears are allowed to explore the wildlife only paths,' I said to Hanley and Endon, as we drove back to our little hut. But we all agreed it was probably safer to stay with our humans, as there is an awful lot of Knepp estate and we might get lost on our own!
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