What we did on our holiday

I went AWOL in Cornwall this week. I did take my laptop, and did plan to blog of an evening – but all that fresh air, and all the up and down steps and hills took it’s toll, and it was a case of collapsing in front of the telly.We stayed in Fowey (pronounced Foy to rhyme with joy), in a lovely house with views out over the Fowey river estuary on the south coast. The photo above was taken from the Megavissey ferry and you can just see the house we rented.

But just to prove that the views from that balcony were wonderful, look at this … That mega boat is ‘The World’ – a humongous cruise liner, that some people actually live on; others have timeshares, and others just holiday on it. It was so big, and luckily the harbour is deep allowing it to visit annually on its tour around the world.  Earlier in the week we had a Royal Navy frigate HMS Cornwall visiting along with the air-sea rescue chopper simulating rescues – it’s all go in that harbour.

We did lots of sight-seeing, and I won’t bore you with the details, but there were two real highlights – firstly was Poldark Mine.  Yes, you read it right, one of the old tin mines was renamed Poldark after the books by Winston Graham, filmed for the BBC in the 1970s – I loved that series and loved all the books when I read them years ago.  We went down the old tin mine, and the tin ore runs through granite, so you can imagine what hard work it was (sorry if this is boring you, but I did study some metallurgy at uni). This little mine with its mini museum and craft activities was privately owned, and not made into a big flashy experience which made it so much more charming.

The other highlight was lunch at The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow run by chef/entrepreneur Rick Stein. It was everything we expected, and the food and service were wonderful – here are OH and daughter posing outside.   A couple of days later we went to Falmouth and had fish and chips from Stein’s chippy – this was also top class!

So finally, to my holiday reading…  I took six books with me, and just about finished one (review soon), and it wasn’t a Daphne Du Maurier.  Daphne lived and wrote all around the environs of Fowey, so you couldn’t get away from her. You can’t actually see Menabilly, where she lived and worked for years and was partly the model for Manderley, it’s set back off the little track of a road, but viewing all the little rocky coves from the ferryboat to Mevagissey from Fowey, you can imagine her writing Rebecca.  Driving back across Bodmin Moor, we could also have detoured to the real Jamaica Inn, along with all the coach parties, but decided to speed on instead, so there endeth my Daphne experience.  I am still going to read some Du Maurier soon though – promise!

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