Trip 2011

Yesterday we drove from Weymouth, Dorchester, to St Ives, Cornwall, via what was planned to be Dorchester (Roman Town House), St. Michael’s Mount, Penzance, Land’s End, then up to St Ives.  The land of the high-speed interstate, this is not.

We left Weymouth after a wonderful “proper English breakfast” -I was even able to get an egg done over easy, which is apparently no small feat in the UK.  The day dawned beautifully considering the rain of the day before.

View from our hotel room of the Weymouth waterfront and city-view.

From there, we headed to Dorchester, about 20 miles north of Weymouth.  We tried to find the Roman Town House, but quickly came to realize that the guidebooks we brought don’t really provide that detailed level of information about the sights to see (Directions? Call the number in the guide…) , and the maps I had printed from MapPoint aren’t very helpful when they say “Take local road 65 yards, then turn right on local road”!  Not that it has been easy to figure out how or where a road is marked if it is anything other than a designated route.  We never found the Roman Town House, but also knew we had spent enough time looking for it, so we headed west.

We did have some splendid views along the way.

View south from the A30 in Dorset. The body of water in the distance is the English Channel.

As we drove, it started to become obvious that we have terribly misjudged the time needed to drive some of these distances, and some things that are on the itinerary are just not going to be able to be seen.  St Michael’s Mount was seen from about five miles away.  We never got to Penzance, as we wanted to get to Land’s End before sunset.  Which we did manage to do.  It had beautiful scenery, but it was fairly chilly and breezy there, so we didn’t stay for the actual sunset – we left about 20 minutes before the sun went down so we could at least get part way to St Ives before it was completely dark.

A fisherman in an open dory passes the headlands at Land's End at the end of the day.

We were both fairly tired already, and still had another 30 to 45 minutes of driving to get to St Ives, find the hotel, unload the car, have dinner, then get ready for bed and another day of attempted sight-seeing.

It turned out that the hotel we stayed at had a fantastic view of St Ive’s harbor area – it was right above the water – but that also meant going down 30 feet of stairs to get down to the hotel.  We quickly decided that once we were down there, we weren’t going to leave, so we ate dinner at their restaurant.  It was a delicious dinner, but I think we were just flat out too tired to enjoy it.  They were supposed to have free wi-fi available, but there was a note that some rooms might not have good coverage because of their locations.  I tried to connect with the WonderPhone, but when I wasn’t able to, I gave up on the laptop for the night.  Besides, I could barely keep my eyes open long enough to enjoy the view below!

View from our hotel room in St Ives, Cornwall, with the moon rising over the Celtic Sea.