Friday, 27 May 2011

Cornwall

Tuesday 17 May
Today we left Newquay and started our first day on the coastal path.  We left at 10.30am and arrived at Perranporth at 5pm.  The track was reasonably up and down, and went through bays and round headlands.  It was exposed in parts, and quite windy and cold. The weather was pretty miserable once we got to Perranporth. Dale had sprained his foot that day, and we were both feeling weary after carrying our packs, so we organised for luggage transfer for the following day.

Wednesday 18 May
Today we headed towards Portreath.  We walked 2 hours to St Agnes.  It started raining quite hard whilst we were on the track, so we waited in a pub while we waited for the bus.  To get to Portreath we had to go via Truro, which is the main city in Cornwall. We stayed at a lovely B&B called Dolphin House.  We walked down to the beach for dinner and had a lovely meal at a restaurant called the Atlantic.  Visit our blog to view photos from the trail and these beautiful towns.

Thursday 19 May
This morning we had a great cooked breakfast at the B&B and then headed towards Hayle where we had decided to stay at Beachside Holiday Park for 3 nights and visit St Ives from there.  It’s a lovely camp right on the beach, one of many in the area.

Friday 20 and Saturday 21 May
We caught the train to St Ives.  We went on a boat which took us out to a seal colony, 3 nautical miles along the coast.  Visit the blog to get to a youtube video of the seals. We were lucky as there were a lot of seals out on the rocks that day.  We then looked at the museum which was dominated by local maritime history, very good value really we also tried some Cornish ice-cream on this day, tasty but expensive.  On Saturday we returned to St Ives and went to the Tate art gallery and to the Food and Wine festival, which included a local producer market and professional cooking demonstrations.

Sunday 22 and Monday23 May
We caught the train to Penzance.  We stayed 2 nights at penzance backpackers.  We went to St Michaels Mount the day we arrived.  It was extremely busy that day, because entry was free.  On monday we rented a car.  We went to Crysauster  ancient village, Minack Theatre and Lands End.  That night we saw a play called ‘Surfing Tommies’ at the Minack theatre.  The play was based around Cornwall Miners that served in World War I and was very entertaining and thought provoking.  All parts were played by a total of 5 actors.

Tuesday 24 to Friday 27 May
Train to Falmouth where we went to Pendennis Castle, and on the ferry to St Mawes Castle.  Both castles were built by Henry VIII and used to protect Falmouth harbour.  Late in the day we took the train to St Austell, where we stayed at the Seven Stars Inn for 4 nights.  Around St Austell we went to the Eden Project, Lost gardens of Heligan, the Charlestown shipwreck and heritage centre and St Austell Brewery.  St Austell is the main Cornwall brewery by far you seen the name everywhere.  William Hicks the founder of St Austell Brewery first started brewing beers at Seven Stars Inn before starting the brewery.

We have come to the end of our time in Cornwall and will be going to Dartmouth in Devon tomorrow.  We had about 11 days going right round from Bude to St Austell.  Anyone that has our schedule will see where we have made changes on the fly as circumstances demanded.  Overall it has been pretty successful, we were caught out I little by the wind, it seems Cornwall has very frequent strong bitterly cold westerly winds.

Funny Thing so far = Fanta is yellow here
Annoying Thing = The camps don’t have kitchens!!
Good Thing = Yum yums so yummy.

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