England
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To The Other Side Of Cornwall
After a couple of days of hiking on the coast path we opt for a change today and take a drive across to the other side of the peninsula and the south Cornwall coast. Most coast to coast drives here take you over the more barren landscapes of middle Cornwall, either over Bodmin Moor or through hills scarred and reshaped due to years of quarrying. We head first through St Austell and down to the pretty harbour of Mevagissey, a classically shaped Cornish fishing village where narrow winding streets between cramped buildings soon rise up the steep sides from where houses of all sizes look sternly out to sea. This is…
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The Path To Polzeath
Something is slightly different this morning as we stir from our slumbers, though it takes us a few minutes to register that it’s the air coming in through the bedroom window: it’s even colder than yesterday. A quick peek through the curtains reveals white grass and sparkling roof tiles – so here we are in mid April, way down in the South West which rarely sees harsh winter, with a proper, sharp frost to start our second day. Whatever happened to that global warming thing??! Today’s walk takes us along the northern side of the estuary from Rock to Polzeath, so we begin with the ferry across the River Camel…
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Cornwall Coastal Path
When you really fall in love with a walk, when you genuinely do have a favourite, your love of it doesn’t diminish with the number of times you walk it, in fact, if anything, you love it just a little bit more each time. And this is one of my favourite walks, probably anywhere, and Michaela has now fallen for it too. It’s still a little cold for the time of year here in the UK and England is struggling to shake off the winter; even on a beautiful day like today, the air has a crispness to it which is normally gone by mid April. But today, set relatively…
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Welcome To Padstow
In truth it feels more like “welcome home”, so often have we visited this lovely place down the years that returning to Padstow often feels like coming home. To get here is a 320-mile, five and a half hour drive from our actual home but our drive down was stress free and sunshine virtually all the way, and arriving to see the picturesque estuary and harbour bathed in the afternoon sun was a treat. The current COVID restrictions mean that only outdoor catering is permitted, and a quick reconnaissance around the harbour established that just 2 of Padstow’s 6 pubs are open, augmented by a number of eateries serving outdoor…
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Cornwall Calling
We aren’t yet in a position to organise any foreign trips but with COVID restrictions easing we can at least now travel within the UK and so tomorrow we head off down to Cornwall, where we will be based in Padstow for the next ten days. We are fortunate enough to own a property in Padstow itself, which we rarely get to visit in high season as in normal times it is used as a holiday let to provide some income in our retirement, but this year we are so starved of travel that we’ve snaffled a few weeks for our own use – in fact we will be there…
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Photographic Memories #17
Photo #17: Cornish Sunset Our last photographic memory featured a sunset, and whilst on that subject we shouldn’t move on without mentioning Cornwall. I have been a regular visitor there for over 40 years now, and still get a feeling of excitement every time we cross the River Tamar and pass the Cornwall boundary sign. Having travelled to many wonderful places around the world, the Camel Estuary, with its heart at Padstow, remains one of our very favourite places on Earth. There’s actually two photos today, in the first you can see the twinkling evening lights of the village of Rock across the estuary dwarfed by the glowing sky, and…
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Harbouring Dreams
As we lose ourselves in reminiscing about previous trips and places visited, 2021 is just starting to take shape and our hopes of resuming our travels are increasing considerably. Our thoughts until recently were that if we make no travel plans until we have each received our dual vaccinations, then we may just be in a position to travel from around the end of July. Developments this week have given further encouragement. I received my first vaccination on Tuesday, Michaela’s is due on Monday, and both of us have appointments for the second dose before the end of May, meaning that allowing the 3-week clearance period after the vaccine would…
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The Turner Contemporary: Are We Philistine?
A 20-minute drive from our home on the Kent coast lies the famed English seaside resort of Margate, once one of the country’s premier coastal destinations and with a reputation somewhat akin to Blackpool and Great Yarmouth. Its heyday as a holiday hotspot has long since passed, and for a couple of decades around the end of the last century, Margate became very run down and a pale shadow of its former self. More recently there have been attempts to restore Margate’s pride, some of which have achieved their objective: Dreamland is back up and running as a theme park (well, it was, pre-COVID), the old town near the harbour…
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Lifted Spirits
Things are definitely looking better. The UK’s vaccination programme is racing ahead impressively quickly, and last Monday the Government released the so-called roadmap to recovery, with “earliest possible” dates for a number of the stages of the route to normality. For those of us waiting patiently to resume travelling the world, this is music to our ears. With some kind of perfect symmetry, these announcements coincided with some beautiful weather as early Spring sunshine brought clear blue skies and glorious days throughout the week. We even had a spectacular full moon – the “Snow Moon”, the second full moon of a calendar year. Living both near the coast and in…
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Cold Snap
Is it just me, or is anyone else irritated by the fact that, in the context of COVID, the world is referring freely to the “British variant” or even more geographically specific, the “Kent variant”, when ex President Trump was consistently vilified for referring to the pandemic as the “Chinese disease”? It’s called “COVID” because phrases like “Asian flu” and “Spanish flu” have been outlawed by the WHO as racially divisive, so how come the “British variant” is acceptable? Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, just as we sit here confined to quarters unable to travel, we get a little bit of the world – indeed a little bit of the…
