Headlines
Farewell to Polperro! (now safe to use the GPS)
Coffee at Tescos
Lunch at the Royal Oak
At the Poachers Inn, Piddletrenthide: a man and his dog and bird
Names and Slogans
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Stream of Consciousness
Farewell to Polperro! (now safe to use the GPS)
And so we leave Garden Cottage, Polperro. It was good :-) Breakfast, packing, load the car... Drive up the hill at 10am.
Final drive up Talland Hill... the last time, thank goodness. Past a few pedestrians. Near the top, a van pulls over to let us pass. It's still a nerve-wracking drive!
Just past the top of the hill there's a sign on the bus stop: "Turn off your GPS". I guess that the narrow roads and high stone walls and hedges are not good for GPS navigation.
We refuel, just a mile or two outside Polperro. And drive...
Coffee at Tescos
The drive starts with the usual narrow roads. Then through Looe -- we seem to have driven through Looe too many times... Down a steep and winding hill. Across the bridge near the centre of town. Past the railway station. Out of town on a narrow winding road. Comment on the diversion: the "main" road east of Looe has been closed all the time we've been here.
We gradually move onto larger and larger roads. Finally -- the M5. Racing along, an easy drive, lots of other cars racing past us. I tend to sit between 50 and 60. The maximum for trucks seems to be 60.
We need a break. A town offers services, all essential sorts, we turn off the motorway. We find a giant Tescos... lots of easy parking, cafe, toilets... and an enormous warehouse of a shop! The shop is as large as a shopping centre!
There's an interesting self-checkout option. You're given a scanner, you scan items as you put them in your trolley. As you wander round you can see the list of what you've bought, return items, check the total. At checkout, just scan "end of shopping" and pay whatever it says you owe. Brilliant!
We only use the cafe. Coffees and "Belgian bun", a sticky bun with icing and currants. All good and it'll probably be the cheapest snack we've had :-)
Back to the M5... And very soon we see signs to Ivybridge. According to family history, I have ancestors from Ivybridge (in Devon, where we now are). Should we pull in? Why?? Ask at the church for any relevant gravestones?! Nooo... If we were still looking for a break, we would have followed the signs to Ivybridge. Instead, we drive on. (With apologetic thoughts to family members who may have more interest in family history!)
Lunch at the Royal Oak Farm & Cafe
Off the M5. Heading towards Dorchester. Still on busy roads. Time to look for lunch. I turn off towards a random village...
We're back on peaceful country lanes. The countryside is a little more open than Cornwall but still fields and hedges and stone walls. (Different styles of stone walls.) I think it may be another "area of natural beauty". It certainly is beautiful :-)
We pass -- almost -- a farm, cafe, shop... The Royal Oak. Pull in. Looks good! We order lunch.People are sitting outside, eating and drinking. We go inside, a room of the farmhouse. Thick stone walls. White painted, clean, cosy. We eat inside -- I'm not yet ready for the idea of deliberately eating lunch in the sun.
Soup and a scone for me, toasted cheese sandwich for Deb. Deb looks under the tea cup and says yes, it's all Prince Albert china. Very fancy :-)
It's a farm, so we're surrounded by rolling green fields. The car is parked next to plastic shelters with strawberries growing. An acre or two of plants, all under shelter -- and in raised hydroponic beds. Rows and rows of strawberry plants in plastic wrapped soil, drip fed with water, a metre or two above the ground. Amazing.
There's also an orchard, and whatever else we don't see. A whole farm's worth, I guess. And a shop, selling what looks like home grown vegetables. Though the fruit may have come from somewhere else -- pink lady apples, with little plastic stickers.
We drive on. Not too long and we're back on larger, busier roads...
At the Poachers Inn, Piddletrenthide: a man and his dog and his bird
... Then we turn north -- onto another one lane road -- towards Piddletrenthide. And the Poachers Inn.
Deb asks, How did I select this place? Pretty much the same way that I selected the Lamb & Flag outside Abergavenny:
We need to drive from Polperro to Winchester. I look half way between the two places, to break the journey. I see the Dorset area of natural beauty, looks good. Scan for an isolated village. Spot the Piddle Inn in Piddletrenthide. Brilliant! Except that they don't respond to my emails. So I look further up the village -- to the only other inn -- and select the Poachers. Obvious choice, really :-)
The village seems to go for a kilometre or more. Following the road which follows the Piddle river. Just one house deep on either side of the road. A very long, narrow village. Poachers is at the further end of the village. Past single lane stretches of the road, with shops and houses squashed either side.
We park on the road -- there's space, opposite the inn. Go inside, check in. There's something about the girl who checks us in... Don't know what it is. Personality type rather than looks... I just automatically like her :-) Anyway.
We check in. Agree that we'll eat in. (Rather than go to the Piddle Inn, my second option.) Then we walk along a bridle trail, following the village back down the valley. It could be the path that Saxons took when they first went up and down the valley.
We find a couple of geocaches!
We also look for an old and supposedly interesting church. I think we stop just a few hundred metres short... Or it's further up the road from our inn. Anyway, we don't find it and don't really miss it. (We found geocaches! What more do we want?!)
We're sitting outside, reading, writing. A man walks up -- bleeding profusely! Turns out, he was walking his dog, ducked down, hit his head on a branch... and scalp wounds (as Deb knows) bleed profusely. He has blood all over his head and face, with spots and splashes on his jacket.
The man's friends take him inside. It's nothing, he says. Accent and style remind me of Richard Briers from The Good Life... a lot older and with white hair. One person stays to catch the dog, Deb helps. The dog finally drops the dead partridge that it's been carrying! The dead bird lies there till a man from the inn -- the man who drew the short straw -- comes out with plastic gloves and plastic rubbish bag.
Dinner in the inn. Deb has chicken. I have duck in "soya and plum sauce". I would have called it sweet and sour. It's the best tasting duck that I can remember!
Back in our room. Wifi is available in the bar, not in our room. I caught a quick connection before dinner, outside. I'll finish this, and a few emails, then go back to the bar to send it all. Part of my journal technology assumes that I'll want to write, even when there is no internet... Clever, eh?
Names and Slogans
Over the last few days, a few good names and slogans...
Mobile food van: Well Burger Me.
Butcher selling, I guess, air dried meat: The Well Hung Butcher.
On the Skins condom vending machine: Wear your Skin when you go in.
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Dr Nick Lethbridge / Agamedes Consulting
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"The greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing." — William Arthur Ward.
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