Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Almost to Newquay but not quite... and kindness


We went to Padstow, finally getting to the ocean. It’s a rather touristy town but beautiful with it’s estuary and a real fishing village. The fish used to be trained to London but no longer, probably now they take by truck.  The fish boats are very colourful, using bright greens and reds on their hulls or sides. 
The Estuary

Low Tide

Functional but pretty too, shhh, don't let the fishermen hear that...

They also bring in mussels, scallops and shrimp.  Quite a few art galleries and locally made food product shops. Along with pastry shops of Cornish pasties and fudge. A famous chef has a restaurant there and next door to his restaurant looks to be another but perhaps not as well “known”. Had a soup in a pub that is commonly served everywhere here, leek and potato. This one was blended, they all aren’t and was very tasty, as are the non-blended ones, just different.

Soup and salad is always served with a side of bread. I have always thought you can rate a restaurant to some degree on the quality of the bread they serve. Most places here serve, in my opinon, very high quality, I usually take only a bite or two (sorry, a waste I know) and it’s all quite different in texture and grain. Talking food again, hope I’m not boring the pants off you…

Off topic again, I read a novel yesterday about the Queen and family being unthroned due to the People’s Republican Party being voted into power and put up in a Council Estate, read, almost slum area of England. It’s about how the entire family deals with the riches to rags experience and how the “normal” people live. Also of the neighbourly help they get and the closeness of the families in the Council Estate.  If interested it’s called The Queen and I, by Sue Townsend.

So we are headed to Newquay which is further down the coast one day and go to Hengar Manor first for me to make a pedicure appointment for later in the week.

Once again, since you exit a different way than going in we ended up on many small roads going what appeared to be nowhere, no signposts. Did go across part of the Bodmin Moor which is stark but really beautiful. Streams and ponds run through and it is unfit for animal habitation.

Along one lane Bruce took a bump in the road to be a buildup of mud. Not so, obviously we had hit something large turned out to be a pile up of rock, granite we were told later. I almost got jolted out of my seatbelt it was that hard a hit. Stop obviously and examine the damage. Cut tire and now flat as a pancake. We are in the middle of “nowhere”, no cell, not raining but windy. So we hail the first car that comes along and he is helpful, village close by, about a half mile down, again thank goodness down hill, called Blisland. Very pretty village, was good to see it, wouldn't have otherwise. We get to the Post Office/Shop and a helpful clerk rings up the local garage to help change the tire. Both of us looked at the job and figured we couldn’t handle it. The fellow comes to the shop and takes us back to the car, has some difficulty swapping up the tire, glad we didn’t try, and calls ahead to make sure the shop has our type of tire to replace it. The tire put on is a temporary so needs replacing soonest.

He guides us to the turnoff for Bodmin but by now we have another problem the car will not steer straight, a bent steering rod discovered by the same fellow after we followed him to his garage. So call the rental agency and after much difficulty in hangups the car got loaded onto an AA (like our BCAA) flat bed truck and taken to Bodmin Enterprise car rental office we had been directed to. We rented from Europcar which I said on the phone but they said Enterprise was an affiliate.

Wrong. Misinformed, Enterprise said they couldn’t do anything for us.  The AA driver has already unloaded the wounded car so he re-loads and takes us to Newquay! Where we were headed to originally in the day, but to the airport which is out of town a ways. Get a new car and head back to St. Tudy in the dark, by now it is 5:00 pm, we have had enough of this adventure, thank you, but arrive at the cottage at about 6:00 pm after a rather harrowing drive in the dark.

We did experience the helpfulness and kindness of the Cornish people. They are lovely! From the fellow we met on the road after the accident, to the people in the shop, to especially the fellow that changed our tire (for a call out charge of course) and assessed the further damage, to the AA driver who didn’t leave us stranded.

Yes, we have seen it before but never more than that day, how kind and welcoming people are here.

So cetainly we saw a lot of the Cornish countryside but it was from a very large truck rather than our car, poor car was on the back.

Poor wee car!


They have now given us a Fiat 500, bigger car, we had a Ford Focus before. We have no idea really how much this will cost, guess we’ll get a rude find out when we turn the car back in. Stuff happens…

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