29 April 2016 (Friday) - Off to Cornwall

As part of the preparations for our Cornish adventure I took "Furry Face TM" round to stay with "My Boy TM" yesterday evening. When we got up (at 4am!) this morning the house seemed very empty without him. "My Boy TM" has promised updates but I was *seriously* missing him after he'd only been gone for a few hours.

We loaded the last few bits and pieces into the car, set off for Suzy-puo's accomplice (this time without Suzy-pup) and set off for a little holiday. We'd arranged a trip to Cornwall with some geo-friends and so we'd agreed to meet up for brekkie at the Hog's Back Cafe (along the A303). We all met up shortly before 7am; the place was closed. So we drove on to a place Nick knew. They did a rather good brekkie; I had the full English before we drove on. After a couple of hours we stopped somewhere near the Hampshire/Wiltshire border where we stopped for coffee. I say "coffee"; the machine gave me a cup of warm milk. But I guzzled it nonetheless.

As we drove we saw pretty much every sort of weather there was. Sun, rain, hail all came in equal proportion as I counted down the counties to Cornwall. We arrived at the Ruthern Valley campsite at mid day and set up camp.
This was a different camp to how we usually camp. This one was based on Jo's camper van. Consequently I didn't realy know how to put the tents up and I felt rather useless. Usually I am the one who knows how every aspect of the camp goes together. I felt rather helpless as we got the camp together. But camp was ready in just under two hours; far quicker than camp usually goes together.
We had a quick spot of lunch and then set on with the business of the weekend.

In Cornwall some kind soul has hidden three hundred and sixty puzzle-geocaches. The puzzles are straight-forward and having got the lot solved all we then had to do was go find them all. Easy!
Our camp was closest to cache #241 so we decided to start there. There was a minor disaster with the A30 having serious road works going on. Effectively we couldn't get to cache #241 easily so we started at #260 (at 3pm) and off we went.

There was some parts of our route where we walked, but this geo-series was mostly designed to be done in the car. But we found ourselves going to some rather beautiful places. Having said that there was a rather worrying episode where we found some quite amazing wood carvings on the road side. We stopped to admire them, and found ourselves in conversation with the carvers. The chaps who carved the wood were charging about ten times what I was prepared to pay, and were grumbing that they's not made a single sale since Easter. Their every other word was "F" and between them they probably had three quarters of a full set of teeth. I was glad to get away from them in one piece.

We'd started caching at 3pm; by 8.30pm it was beginning to get dark and we found ourselves having to leave the car and go walkabout in the woods. Enough was enough so we gave up and headed back to camp. But looking at how many caches we'd found we made a point of stopping off to collect some roadside ones that we were driving past so that when we got back to camp we were pleased to have found one hunded caches.

Once back at camp Nick cooked up a rather good bit of chilli for dinner. We scoffed that with gusto, and then I washed up. If someone else is happy to cook for me I am very happy to do the washing up. And then having washed up I had a shower. I do like a camp site with running water and showers...


No comments:

Post a Comment