North to South................we made it !!!!!

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Friday 31th July
North to South.............we made it !!!
Two dry days in a row!!Well at least the forecast id for the rain not to arrive until this afternoon so we shall get out and make best the conditions to get to the end of the road at Lands End and also take in other towns around the southwest corner of England.
We don’t think we could live permanently close to a beach or the seaside if the local seagulls were to make as much racket as the ones in Penzance did this morning!!No early morning choir from thrushes etc just the sqwark of gulls!!
The microwave paid another dividend this morning allowing us to cook up scambled egg on toast garnished with a squeeze of Vegemite from the tube we bought with us from NZ.Most mornings when we have been preparing breakfast for ourselves this has been our hot course for brekkie and has maintained a ‘feeling’ of being at home with the hotel room doubling as our kitchen!!That is not to say that we haven’t also enjoyed the full English or Scottish breakfasts at the hotels where it’s been included in the tarrif or the B&B’s or our stay at Aileen and Johns home in Montrose and someone else has prepared everything for us.Its been the variety that continues to make this adventure fun!!
It is only a short distance of about 10 miles to Lands End from Penzance and this is to be our first port of call.
The land towards the southern end of the road is similar to that at John O’Groats,flat and uninteresting in itself.But it is the prize of being able to stand where the road comes to an end that is our goal.
Now you would think that the canny Scots,most of whom have an eye on how to make and hang onto money,(no apologies to our many Scottish relatives here for we class ourselves in the same mould)would have charged for car parking at least at John O’Groats.But no it was free(well at least we didn’t notice any pay and display signs!!)
However here at Lands End the locals or whoever owns the car park charges you if you want to park your car and walk to ‘the end of the road’.And the road leading to Lands End itself for the last half mile of so is narrow and has solid no stopping lines on both sides.Even the local farmers place signs forbidding anyone pulling of and parking at a farm gate where there is usually enough room to squeeze a small car in off the road.
We hadn’t come all this way just to ‘look’ at Lands End and so the BBA had to relent and pay the 4 quid charge to park RR to achieve the goal for the day.!!At least if we decide to go off and take a walk along the clifftops while we are here we won’t be worrying about RR parked all exposed as she was at the Giants Causeway when we refused to pay the €6 to park in the car park!!!
There is more than a few shops selling tourist novelties at Land’s End.Here ther is what could be described as a miniature fun park where you can pay to go into attractions like Dr Who.What he has to do with Lands End is beyond us but we guess the kids have got to be kept happy after all it is just another scenic spot for them and they want some action.
There is one very good free attraction and that is the display on the huge number of ways and means people have done the world famous trip of travelling from Lands End to John “ Groats.It was amazing to put together all the different modes of transport,reasons etc that people have used in being involved in the epic journey.You can even ‘do’the jouney yourself in a few minutes flat as you stand in front of a big screen with a film on fast forward speeding you through the countryside with a commentary running telling you where you are.
Land’s End has the appearance of being a very wind swept place but we were fortunate today that there is only a moderate wind and a cool temperature hovering in the mid teens.
So we stood on the spot which marks the end of Britain and took photos to remember the journey and then headed off on a walk around the cliff tops to take in some of the coastal scenery with jagged rocks and crashing seas from the Atlantic Ocean.
With the sky looking a little more threatening we drove off towards St Ives,a place that we remembered from that famous English nursery rhyme we learned as kids about a man from St Ives who had many wives etc etc etc.
The coastal road to get there proved be an exciting ‘one lane track’ and unlike in Scotland,here the drivers coming the other way were clearly not used to driving them as repeatedly they tended to plant their foot to take the right of way.On one particular spot of the road where a farm building jutted out on to a blind corner (we have come across this many times in Britain as the houses and outbuildings were here long before motor cars needed sealed roads to travel on)a bus coming the other way couldn’t make the turn in one attempt and back to reverse and try again to get around it.Why buses of this size are allowed on roads that are clearly not suitable for them is hard to understand.
You arrive into St Ives via a cliff top road and looking down on the township it looked like it would be a very interesting town to walk around and take in the shops and also the bay and surrounding cliffs.However as we drove down to the town we could see that finding a park was going to be a challenge given the number of other holidaymakers trying to do the same as us.
The council car park for the town was near the top of the cliff top and looked like it was going to be a good walk down to the town itself so unwisely we carried on down the hill towards the town thinking that we might find a park closer.But it was a bad move as the streets in the town itself became very narrow and there was clearly not going to be anywhere to car in the town.We couldn’t even find a place to stop briefly to take a photo or two of the town and the beach area because the traffic volume so was so great and we had to keep moving with it.
Looking for a location that would enable us to take in the Cornwall rugged coastline we moved onto the B3301 which from the way it is drawn on the map indicated that it ran along the coast.It wasn’t until Portreath just before the road turns inland that we found a place that was close enough to the beach to take a walk.
Here with the weather looking like it was just about ready to break into rain we took a walk along the beachfront.Down on the beach families had set up their shelters(not from the sun!!!)and kids were playing in the sand.In NZ you just wouldn’t expect to see people on the beach in such cool overcast conditions but we now understand fully that in England you make the best of what you can during the week’s holiday at the beach especially if you live the rest of the year in a large city away from the coast.
We then headed over to Falmouth and the east coast of Cornwall but the rain that had threatened finally arrived and with the frustrations of not being able to find a park in the places we had hoped to stop,we continued on back to Penzance to put our feet up.One of the little features of our hotel room is that the TV also had a DVD player in it and we settled down with the rain coming down to watch one of the DVD’s we had brought with us for times such at this.
Despite the weather turning against us later in the day we did achieve our major objective for the day and that was to say we have now driven from the very north and top of the road at John O’Groats to the very south and end of the road at Lands End.!!

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Comments

[Chris]

St Ives
If you want some photos of St Ives for your trip record let me know. They might be taken late September but we were told it was the best day of the 2008 summer. We parked in the carpark and took the stroll down to the town. The climb back is the puffing bit.