Somerset, London & Cornwall.

Sunday, 6th September.

We've had an easy week, tried out the public transport with partial success, sold the telly, an extension lead and one bike on ebay, had a day trip to London and are currently in Cornwall.

The first public transport trial was on Tuesday when we decided to catch the local bus from the village into Bridgwater...the problem was that the bus company changed their timetable on that day but neglected to inform the general public which resulted in a 45 minute wait!  The main purpose for the journey was to return the GPS we'd bought in April and which failed us only a short time later, but it was found to be fixable!  We celebrated with a light lunch with Marion in Daisy May's Tea Room in the High Street, a lovely little cafe where the food is all home made.

Armed with a new timetable, we bused into Bridgwater again on Wednesday morning, having decided to catch the train from there to Bristol.  After buying return tickets at the train station we prepared for a bit of a wait but it wasn't long before the ticket officer informed us that the train had broken down and there would be a one and a half hour wait until the next one...apologizing, he offered to refund our ticket money and so we went back to the bus station, studied the route map and caught the next bus to Street, near Glastonbury.  Street is home to Clark Village, a factory outlet village which we roamed around, didn't buy anything there but bought cold drinks and shared a large slice of home made carrot cake in the Mad Hatter's Tea Rooms in Crispen Hall before busing back to our village.

On Friday, we went to London by coach to meet Mireille and Mark who are visiting their family there.  They met us at Hammersmith station and from there we 'tubed' to London Bridge.  They had previously been to the  'Shard'

and suggested that we might enjoy a visit...apparently it costs about £30 each to go up to the viewing floor and nothing to go to the 30th floor for drinks at the bar.  Needless to say, we went for drinks and enjoyed the spectacular free view.

The afternoon was spent lunching, walking along the river and across the Millenium Bridge, around St Paul's Cathedral, 'tubing' to Covent Garden where a scene from "Carmen" was being expertly performed,

We then strolled along The Strand and exchanging travel stories over drinks before finally parting, happy that we'd been able to catch up again.

On Saturday morning we collected a hire car in Bridgwater and drove through Dartmoor to Cornwall, with an encounter with a friendly horse along the way,

and visiting Port Isaac again, only this time we had to park at the top of the hill outside the village and walk down.  On our previous visit we parked on the harbour front but that was before Doc Martin moved in to 'Port Wenn', making it a popular tourist attraction.  It is a lovely old fishing village, higgledy piggledy streets with houses almost on top of each other and because we arrived late in the afternoon, not too many people about.

This morning we had a 30 minute ride on the Bodmin Wensford steam train

on the way to Padstow.  It was a gorgeous day and Padstow was chokkers, all the shops and cafes were full so we bought pasties and ate them as we wandered around the town.  Our thought was to drive south along the coast, ducking into some of the villages along the way but we found that to be a trial because of the traffic on the narrow lanes and shortage  of parking so continued on through Truro to St Mawes via the King Harry car ferry.  It was our first visit to St Mawes and we were impressed, though busy it wasn't crowded so we were able to stroll around at our leisure, enjoying the scenery and the yummy Cornish ice creams!

We were mistaken in thinking that we could ferry from St Mawes to Falmouth as the ferry is for passengers only, no cars so we returned via King Harry car ferry and made our way to our overnight stop near Hayle...more exploring to come tomorrow!