Cornwall Road Trip

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After managing to get Grant added to the driver’s list moments before the car hire place closed, we headed back to the 'Grand Shey Bu Hostel' and waited for Matt to arrive at Helen and Beth’s.

We chucked everything in the car and headed towards the M3 motorway with the help of Grant’s fancy GPS navigational device, which proved to be very useful throughout the trip, even though it rendered me jobless.

We stopped to get more petrol plus food from the service station (where are the Bombay Hills or Mercer when you need them!).
We had to stop later on so Matt could get some food as well. After a bit of a mission, we finally found a services area that was open and he was stuck with a rather early cooked breakfast for dinner, which he had to consume in the car with a metal knife and fork as they didn’t provide any plastic ones to takeaway!

We found ourselves driving through narrow country lanes lined with hedgerows rather close to each side of the car. They tell me the headlights racing through the braches makes it looks like we were going fast than we were. However, that didn’t stop an almighty deafening scream as we turned the next corner to find a huge black bull in the middle of the road!
Thankfully Brendan is rather used to my often loud vocabulary, and we safely arrived at Widecombe-in-the-Moor, in Dartmoor, at about 11pm.

Brendan had booked us in to an ‘expedition centre’ that was in a converted old stone farm house, complete with thatched roofing, run by a cute elderly couple.
We stayed in the two loft rooms of a converted stone barn, which was snug, but all we needed. Plus it was nice and close to the bathrooms in the dark, and not to mention cool evening temperatures.

After an eventful evening, we all got ready and quickly went to bed. Personally was just excited to try out my new sleeping bag, which was very cosy and warm :)


We had the reasonably early rise of 8.30am on Saturday, and packed up our stuff, which thankfully wasn’t much. We gathered our coins and paid for our night’s accommodation in the little envelope provided by the owners. Then jumped in the car and headed into the township of Widecombe-in-the-Moor for breakfast.

After a bit of looking around and inquiring with the locals, it appeared that none of the café’s in the township were open.

Helen and I went into the little grocery shop that sported a sign something similar to the ones me and my sister used to make for our grocery stall under the big tree in our backyard - We would sell our parents the fruit and veges out of the garden that they had grown - entrepreneurial at such a young age!

This grocery store wasn’t that much bigger, Helen described as being around about the same size as her bathroom. We found some bananas and fudge to keep us going until the next food stop.

The best part of the whole experience was after Helen read the sign on the till counter - ‘We do not give cash out. However, cash can be obtained from the post office.’
Helen politely asks the shopkeeper where the post office is, to which he responds by stepping about half a meter to his left, in front of the adjacent till and asks if he can be of assistance?

We looked up to find a sign above his head saying ‘Post Office’!
However, it turns out that this post office can’t give cash out on HSBC cards - I mean its only one of themost widely spread banks in the world…

We continued our drive towards Newquay and found a little river side café along the way in the Dartmoor Forest and all had big cooked breakfasts. Grant and I also decided to have scones for our Devonshire tea in Devon.

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