November 1 home sweet home!

 After 2 months on the road and sea, we are finally home but we’ve been hiding - jet lagged and suffering with a touch of vertigo and a big dose of some lurgy yuk!  After nigh on 18,000 km and 33 hours door to door from the UK to home with but a few snatched naps, we fell into bed feeling totally exhausted but mightily relieved.  It was soooo good to be home - even if it was after 2am! What a trip and what a delightfully welcome sight was the garden and the birds - once we and the sun woke up! We were pretty woozy which is not surprising given the roads we had bumped across for 5 weeks. Lindsay figured we had driven around 5000 km total between UK and the Faroes - but it felt like much more to me having had my eyes glued to a map a lot of the time. Overall it was a pretty hard trip, physically speaking, but one of fascinating discovery - and that’s without the North Poles!

The garden has survived very well with lots of lovely new growth including two new flower stalks on the orchid (a welcome home present?) and there are loads of baby lemons and limes coming along and over a dozen figs swelling on the tree. All is well except us - BUT as the lyrics go - “we will survive”.  And we have! 

What's next? India - a totally new country, a new continent and  lots of challenges no doubt. A bientot .......

October 25 to 30 ...and that's it, we're heading home!

 From a farm stay with chooks and turkeys to a field behind the Red Lion, a C17 hotel near Winfrith in Dorchester, we’re on a seemingly long trek east to Cambridge to return our campervan. By Australian standards it’s not a huge distance but the traffic and road systems (and avoiding large population centres) make it rather more challenging - and slow going.  The pub is great but the ‘camping’ amenities leave a little to be desired, but we had a huge pub meal and woke to a rather lovely misty morning. 

Low ceiling create a cozy feeling

We continued eastward with an overnight stop Crowborough and a delightful catch up with a fellow passenger from our 2022 Iceland expedition. From there it was straight onto the London Ring Road, what a shocker! but we arrived still sane in Roseberry a wee bit north of Cambridge and almost at the end of our journey. 

The mist lifted and the sky was crisscrossed with contrails

The grass underneath this tree was a red carpet - gorgeous 

Next day we returned the van in Cambridge and spent a couple of nights eating up our stores and resting in preparation for our 17000 Km flight home, a ghastly 22.5 hours (with 2hr to change planes in Dubai).

Columns of dusky clouds reaching up to greet the fiery-gold dawn 

October 24 A fascinating but nail biting day!

 

A snapshot of Cornwall - we are camped a couple of Km from Lizard

I've felt quite excited to be exploring Cornwall - a place where pasties tickle the taste buds and stories of mining, pirates and smugglers stir the imagination. So many of our mining towns in Australia were populated with people from this very region. Here pasty shops abound and mines, or rather the remnants of both coal and tin mines, perch high above the Atlantic in some incredible locations on this stretch of coast known as the ‘Tin Coast’. And the region is also home to the world's largest collection of undersea tin mines, including Botallack the ruins of which were used as filming locations for the BBC series Poldark (didn’t we all read Poldark in the 70s?) and the massive tin mine at St Just which we drove through later in the  morning.  More than 20 years after the closure of the last tin mine in Cornwall, they are still devouring the area but for other precious metals - the earth has no choice but to relinquish its treasured minerals to satisfy our demands. Today they are extracting battery-grade lithium carbonate. The history is interesting and the rugged moorland raw and heartbreakingly beautiful - to my eyes.
But first to Penzance! As we drove away from Lizard, I was humming in my head “A policeman’s lots is not a happy one ….. “. Many of us, me included, grew up with Gilbert and Sullivan and the Pirates of Penzance was very popular. That is all to say I felt we simply had to visit Penzance. We didn’t encounter any pirates but saw a couple of sunken boats! We drove from there along the sea front to Newlyn - very pretty but with a very narrow road …  and then on to Mousehole (pronounced mouzel!). We continued along the cliff road until it simply got too narrow for our campervan - by this time we were, rather than becoming accustomed to, becoming a bit edgy with ‘roads’ barely inches wider than our campervan but more was to come ……  my fave MapsMe app has fallen from favour as I have  tried to use it to navigate England’s incy-wincy so called ‘roadways’. However …. 

A sunken ship!

I’m a great navigator?? but we did get back on track

We lost count of the Red Lion hotels we passed by

We drove away from this seaside tourist ‘track’ - or is that trap?! into the moorlands and found the ruins of the Carn Galver tin mine. We had this little place to ourselves so inspected every angle. 

The moors were russet with Autumn bracken - so lovely

We started seeing the ruins of mines

The tall stack of the steam-pumping engine house.
The other is the engine house which raised ore to the surface

The Count House in the distance

The Count House located near the mine is where the mine manager lived, kept the accounts and entertained shareholders to lavish dinners. It is now where the Climbers Club store their gear but before then it is reported that around the time of WWI D H Lawrence was a tenant (some interesting history there).

The crag of Carn Galver 

Keeping watch over us at a distance was the crag of Carn Galver (or Galva) which takes its name from the old Cornish carn guillea - ‘rock pile lookout’. This tumbled monolith has been watching over these lands from prehistory through the ‘Industrial Age’ of man carving up the bowels of the earth and ever since. It is a silent but rather awe-inspiring guardian and home to rare lichens, ferns and mosses and a number of endangered fauna species. Some of the stone walls enclosing fields nearby are believed to have been built in the Bronze Age. Other structures date back to the Iron Age. We didn’t climb the crag but I understand there is a ring of stones around the Carn dating back to Neolithic times so perhaps it was also a sacred site.  The entire region has neolithic remnants - wish that we had time (and a guide) to explore.  And so it goes on and on and on … 

Himalayan honeysuckle

With a little reluctance we hopped back into the van as we were heading for St Ives but stopped for a picnic in Nancherrow or perhaps it was Tregeseal. Either way it was on the road to St Ives near St Just where we pulled into a little spot off the road and discovered these pretty flowers. We got some frowns from the locals but I guess they get sick of tourists. Incidentally St Just is the western-most town in mainland England

Ahh St Ives - will live on our memory of a ‘harbour too far’!

And who doesn’t know the riddle - “On my way to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives …” yeah well we went over and over that dammed riddle until we got to St Ives further north. Pretty as a postcard but evil!!! It lured us to its quaint harbour and on to lovely harbour-hugging roads and then said “whoops these are now one-way and there’s no going back, no way out - sooorry AND the roads are going to get narrower”. And they did every metre. To cut a long story short, as you can see we escaped but not without some deep scars, no fingernails left to speak of and frayed and shattered nerves. We provided lots of onlookers with some ‘light entertainment’ - only one offered any help. Can you believe it?! (much shaking of heads and gnashing of teeth from within our trapped vehicle). But yes we escaped and headed for a pub as far away as possible for a stiff drink. So much for the man and his bl… 7 wives! You know answer course ……. 

We eventually came home to Mr George who supervised our showers. What a day! You’ve got to laugh or get blind drunk, which we didn't - quite!

October 22-23 Cornwall and the Lizard Peninsula

 Late afternoon we made it to the Lizard Peninsula - we’re in Cornwall at the most southerly point of England. Callooh Callay! We’re staying at Little Trethvas, a wee farm, and are surrounded by pretty chooks and baby chicks and we’re shepherded everywhere we go by two slightly/quite aggressive turkeys - George and Mildred who have a baby. Ever been bailed up by a male turkey? Not fun in the toilet! It’s a little intimidating. But it’s a comfy homely place and the owners so lovely. They told us that there was a folk singing night at Cadgwith pub that night so we set off. Signage and road width got the better of us and we got well and truly lost in lanes in the dark where we simply couldn't turn around. So much for the night life - tomorrow is another day! 

Lost in the dark!

Next day we set out to explore The Lizard with its many coves. We walked through the Lizard Downs to reach Kynance Cove - quite a lovely walk and wonderful sitting sipping hot chocolate by churning seas and foreboding rocks. The heathland was glorious - lots of plants which I could almost recognise but not quite without their flowers. But recognisable everywhere was heather and gorse and wild roses whether Dog or Field I’m not sure but beautiful nevertheless.  We took the gentler path i.e., not straight down the cliff, to get to the café on the edge of the water. Of course what goes down, must come up – and as I panted back up the hill a small flock of goats were laughing at me from their rocky perch on the other side of the steep valley. 

We walked out on the cliff top as far as we dared

Far below is the steep path with a few people on it - high tide blocks this path from the cafe

Strange perspective but the cafe is down there around under the cliff

almost there!

Hot chocolate with a view

A few people dashed across this wee cove when the waves receded - and got wet feet.

On the walk we passed the ‘path’ to the Kynance Gate settlement, a prehistoric settlement perhaps Bronze Age but it was not open to us to explore - and the whole area was up to your knees in mud.

Part of the site (source Web)

With food in mind we drove back into The Lizard for a bite to eat. I was keen to have fish and chips but all outlets were closed so we settled for a yummy pastie at the Witch Ball, a C15th Freehouse.  Just a word on Cornish pasties - there is as much variation in them as there are people making them.  

We tried to get to the very tip but it was wall to wall people and vehicles so we headed back to explore other coves along the peninsula. Some were just too difficult to get in to but we saw lots of ‘Cornish-ware’ houses along the way and an amazing harbour at Porthleven.

Porthleven

We drove around this complex harbour and out to the furthest point only to find the road getting narrower and narrower. We managed to get through but it marked the first of a few 'uncomfortable', extremely nerve-wracking experiences with village 'streets'. 

A cute place we passed on our way back to camp tonight after visiting Falmouth was Gweek. I know we’ve being doing the whole thing too! The Cornish Seal Sanctuary is here. They rescue and rehabilitate grey seal pups from around the Cornish coastline - it’s a pretty wild coastline. 

Tomorrow we explore the other 'claw' of the ‘spanner head’ - Penzance, St Ives and …….

October 20-21 North Devon to Cornwall

 

Leaving Wales

We tore ourselves away from the delightful Laugharne to move further south to Cornwall. Distances don’t seem to be great but it takes much longer than you think – traffic, detours, etc. The end result was that we arrived in our next overnight spot, Ilfracombe in North Devon, just on twilight.  In this area there are a number of villages with Combe in their names - in Welsh that means a steep or narrow valley.

Ilfracombe, Hele Valley and Combe Martin

This place is gorgeous and we were glad we had booked a couple of night. It’s set in deep valleys on the coast and it was beautifully quiet. 

The arrow marks Ilfracombe with Hele Valley next door

We spent a day driving around the area before heading south again the following day into Cornwall. 

I have never seen so many cabins being transported - nor as many roadworks!

Boscastle - a fishing port and village on north Cornwall coast

Padstow

We visited Padstow to see Rick Stein’s restaurant and cooking school - but sadly it could only be on a drive past. Man oh man it is impossible to park anywhere in these ‘villages’ and at the moment its seems sooo busy but maybe with 60 odd million people on a wee island state it’s always like this. Again we felt thankful for our wide brown lands! And yes of course we’ve eaten Cornish pasties - so many variations, but I want some non-pub fish and chips. However moving on …..