Cornwall Tour - Friday 29th April

Another long weekend and money was tight. What better way to celebrate the nuptials of the future King of the British Empire than to hire a car and do a tiki tour around Cornwall.

We were then faced with a conundrum, do we A: stay in London for the Royal Wedding and go and join in the celebrations and risk not getting to Cornwall until midnight or do we B: get up super early and start driving to Cornwall and stop off at a country pub along the way to watch it and miss the traffic?

Option B won, which saw us on the tube to Heathrow to pick up our racy 1.5L Fiat Punto. We managed to pack more clothes than we did when we went to Italy but considering its England we had to pack for winter as well as spring. 

Louise had planned the route with the help of Google maps but found that the GPS was an even better friend, once you got used to the lady’s voice and realised there was a difference between “turn left” and “bear left”.

London being London meant that it took us a good hour to find Avis and get going in our car, but we were soon off zooming down the M4 heading East. Hamish did a stellar job driving in a new country, even though we didn’t know what the speed limit was and 90% of cars seemed to be passing us (haven’t had any speeding tickets come through so fingers crossed.

Group shot!

 The first major city we passed was Bristol, don’t think we will go there again in a hurry.

By the time we reached “critical Royal Wedding watching time” we were in Taunton, which is one of the major cities in Somerset. To be honest, it was a bit like Palmerston North (I take it by know we are not fans of Palmy). We were convinced that all the local pubs would be bursting with locals at 10am drinking Pimms and watching the wedding live on telly. This wasn’t exactly true. We stumbled across lots of people setting up village celebrations and things but it seemed like 10am was too early for a lot of British people and they were watching it at home. Nevertheless we found a pub showing and there were a handful of other punters in there. To celebrate we had lots of tea and fruitcake and the odd champagne and a pretty decent pub lunch.

First of many teas in honour of the wedding

Fair to say that the wedding is all people talked about for 4 straight days.

Taunton castle with pretty flowers

Our first planned destination was Bodmin. A few interesting facts about Bodmin – their visitor information centre decided that a Bank holiday weekend where they probably get 2 times their population in visitors, was a good day to close. There are also rumours of the “Beast of Bodmin” a 4-foot long creature that roams the moors. We were quite keen to spot this cat (and because we now have a super duper camera, the chances of getting a good photo were high). So we set off in the direction of Dozemary pool which is claimed to be the home of the Lady of the Lake (for more on this intriguing take, see Interesting fact #1).

Now you will see from the photos below that the “pool” is quite large. That is because Louise got it wrong, which we didn’t discover until we were in a touristy gift shop and Lou looked at a local map. Telling Hamish this was a bad idea. We were back in the car driving back towards the correct “pool” this time before you could say “Excalibur”.

What we thought was the pool in the background

Hamish and the Punto...rock on

Some of Bodmin's finest

Hamish trying to make friends

iphone GPS instead of a map

Hamish with the pretend sword...

We experienced a few little GPS related setbacks before we found the local pub to have dinner, a cheap and cheerful affair. Then we were off to Menkee Lodge, the B&B we were staying in. It was a lovely old manor with lovely old people. It did make us feel like we were too young to be staying in B&B’s. We just don’t have the knack for mindless chat that older people do. Anyhoo, we had an early night pretty tired after all our adventures.

Our cute little room

 Highlight: The pretty country lanes. England is actually pretty beautiful, especially with wild spring flowers.

Lowlight: The lack of atmosphere at the pubs for the wedding

Interesting Fact #1: According to the legend, Dozmary pool is where King Arthur rowed out to the Lady of the Lake and received the sword Excalibur. The pool is also the place where Bedivere returned Excalibur as Arthur lay dying after the Battle of Camlann.

Interesting Fact #2: Taunton was a place of considerable importance in Saxon times, guess things have changed.

Interesting Fact #3: Lou (aka the conspiracy theorist) thinks that the Royals knew about Bin Laden’s impending capture and that’s why they postponed their honeymoon…