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.
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| The Estuary |
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| Low Tide |
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| 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.
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| 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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