Day: April 4, 2015

Today was an easy short day full of tourist traps 🙂 (You’d think I wasn’t a tourist!) most of our morning was spent driving out of Cornwall back towards the rest of England basically backtracking through what we did yesterday. 

The first new place we saw was Cheddar Gorge- which basically turned out to be the Pigeon Forge of the UK. lol That being said… The gorge was WAY bigger than I expected and I definitely didn’t expect the town to be built INTO the rock walls. Had we been able to find a parking spot within a mile of the little town center we would have spent some time there…but it was crazy busy… I’m guessing because it’s Easter weekend. 

We then headed to Bath. They have a old Roman bath. But something they don’t have: parking. So…we decided that the pictures online were just as good, especially since it was $20 a person to walk in and see the bath that really isn’t even that old. The only thing Roman that is left is the actual basin of water,  all the structure and tile and everything was built in the last 150 years. 

One oddity- all of Bath seems to have been built out of the same color stone. 

So… On to Stonehenge! They’ve put up this huge center and exhibit and cafe and gift shop. Lol it’s ridiculous.  

So many people…  

The rocks           

We paid $60 to take a bus back to a fence to see the stones only to leave and drive RIGHT by them from the road on the other side through a fence just a little further away. Haha 

 We were all like, Ahhh man! Haha but oh well, most of the things we’ve done have been free or very cheap…and I’m sure it goes to keeping up the site. 

I am constantly surprised by just how rural the majority of England is outside of the cities…it’s not like the US where we have tons of little towns scattered all around, if you get outside of the major cities…you may find a tiny cluster… But it’s just countryside.

We got to the hotel early and we’re totally eating at the Pizza Hut beside the hotel because this is a total tourist zone and American restaurants are all they have here. 

The don’t have breadsticks here, they only have garlic bread. Also they put corn on their pizza. 

Tomorrow morning is Norah’s day…we are going to Peppa Pig World! (Thanks to my friend Kelly for letting me know that it existed!)

We started out this morning by visiting Clovelly. A cute weird little seaside village that doesn’t have cars. The cobblestone streets are only like 6-7ft wide in most spots and it was so amazing to imagine living someplace seaside like that with no car alarms, no tires, squeally brakes…. I think they’re doing something right here! Except that the entire town is owned by one person who rents spaces for houses and businesses. I’m not sure how exactly a single person ends up owning an entire town and charging visitors admission to enter the town… But never the less, it was cool. Would have been infinitely cooler if it wasn’t pouring down rain making the stone path so slippery we were all worried we were going to end up rolling down into town.

 After Clovelly, we drove through Morwenstow…there was a 3 mile hike here along the jagged coastline but again….rain, cold and self-diagnosed bronchitis…I decided I’d better not. Although from what I’ve read- so many ships used to get wrecked on these rocks and the rocks were so jagged that the townspeople would find pieces of limbs among the rocks. There was an old graveyard here though and good view of the coast from afar.

 Our next stop was St. Nectin’s Glen. A remote waterfall that flows through a rock. It was over a mile hike each way in the freezing rain so we nominated the geologist. 🙂 I kinda wish I wasn’t so sick because the pictures looked so cool… And there as a money tree along the trail! I’ve been searching for a money tree all week! The local legend is that if you hammer a coin into the tree, it will cure illness and anyone who removes a coin will be struck with the illness. (You know these trees could never exist in the US, some methhead would pull every coin out and try to scrap the metal or something haha)

 Next was the town of Tintagel, the home of King Arthur’s castle. But when we got to town, it was so touristy we decided it wasn’t worth it. Lol we did spot the Castle Hotel that said that you had to try the “Cornish Cappucino Delux” so we stopped to try it. Turns out it was a fancy tea room and we have a not so fancy two year old 🙂 they didn’t have “take away” cups, so no Delux Cappucino. lol however, there were beautiful views around the back and you could see the castle ruins without paying the admission and without dealing with steps or tourists. Yay!

We then headed all the way out to the southern most tip of England to Penzance. If I didn’t have to drive in it, I would think these little seaside towns were amazing but they were all built before cars and not redesigned since. 

This was not a one way street, by the way

 We visited the Minack Theatre- an open air theatre sitting right on the edge of the island. I can’t imagine seeing a Shakespeare play or something here…

The water was so turquoise…unexpected with the climate they were having. 

The plants at the theatre were very unique too

As we left on our way to St Ives (we did NOT meet a man with 7 wives) we could see St Michael’s mount off in the distance and the fog. We will be closer tomorrow, I hope to get better pictures.

St Ives from the top of the hill  

We then made our way to our hotel for the night. It was 5 floors up (no elevator) but we have an amazing view!