England #7 – A trip to Padstow

note: this is actually a trip that my bff Kim and I took to England last May – I’ve been posting entries on PB and am copying them here. Clearly it is taking me forEVER as I made this one last October, and remarked then on how long it’s taking…

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OMG I’m making an England Trip Entry! Finally. I see my last one was August 3. I am already breaking my Seriously Glacial Posting Times from the last trip, and not in a good way. And on a side note, seven years ago today we left on our very first England trip. I think we were actually checking into the airport at this moment, and Kim was madly flinging stuff out of her massively overloaded Suitcase From Hell – good times!

SO. On this Tuesday, way back in May, we’d planned to go to Port Issac and Tintagel Castle, because they are within reasonable driving distance and we were trying to be realistic about what we could actually accomplish in one day. Hahahahaha!!!! We decided to stop for coffee and breakfast first, at a coffee shop Kim had spotted on Google Maps that looked really good – she’d wanted to try it the day before, but it was in the wrong direction from Exeter. She believed it was on the way for this jaunt, so we were all, YAY! We’ll get coffee, have breakfast, then head on to Port Issac and then up the coast to Tintagel!

Let me just note right here that Kim is not a very good reader of maps, and despite being a much better reader of maps myself, I continued to let her navigate without ever questioning her for the entire trip. So this was not the only time that the coffee shop right on the way ended up somewhere, ummmm, unexpected. And we were always looking for coffee because all we had at our lodgings was instant. Which is a lot better than NO coffee, but isn’t real coffee. She was just looking at the time it would take us to get to the coffee shop and the fact that it was vaguely in the right direction. In Reality, it really was not in the right direction at all, and was WAY out of the way…. but happily, it was in Padstow. An absolutely gorgeous little fishing village that we DID want to check out. So, no harm done.

Oh, while I am thinking of all the places we wanted to see, I’ll post this amusing map again. I posted it on my very first entry, but I don’t think everyone could see it because I hadn’t yet figured out how to post from Flickr and I may have had my Facebook settings wrong to share it. It’s a screenshot of my Ulmon Maps To Go app, which is a really really great little app- it lets you save stuff in categories and make notes and for six months or so prior to the trip I was devouring travel guides and marking everything I wanted to see on the map. At some point I posted it on FB to amuse Kim, asking if she could maybe take six months off work since I was afraid we were going to need more than two weeks:

Anyhow, Padstow (along with 45,064 other spots) was on The List, so it worked out fine. We ended up having lunch at the coffee shop, and getting coffee from a food van in the car park when we arrived. It was a gorgeous sunny day, and we just walked all over the place going “ooOOooo!!!” It was pretty crowded, but we were in Cornwall at an excellent time of year, apparently. Too early for the massive summer crowds, but late enough that the weather was very nice.

There were cute little fishing boats everywhere-

And such pretty colorful houses-

Padstow has a huge May Day celebration every year, and I’d actually made a note to be sure and avoid going that day because it draws enormous crowds. Naturally I never looked at that note again, and we narrowly missed May Day – it was the day before we were there. Hence all the fun flags!

The coffee shop is called Cherry Trees, and is more of a little lunch spot than just coffee. It’s teeny and was packed with people, and has the best fresh crab sandwiches EVER. And flat whites! Naturally the only part of our meal that I took a picture of was the spring water.

And this is how you park in England! This is also the size car you need. Ours was a teeny bit bigger, but not much.

So after several hours in Padstow, we went on up the coast to Tintagel. I will save Tintagel for the next entry, because OMG it may be the most gorgeous place I’ve ever been in my entire life, so there are lots of pictures. Lots and lots and lots! We ended up going to Port Issac Wednesday, as there wasn’t enough time for all three in one day, especially since we didn’t get a terribly early start. On the map it looks like it would take no time at all to get from one spot to the next, but in reality there’s a lot of winding around on teeny roads. It was only 15 miles to Padstow from where we were staying, but it takes over half an hour to get there (according to the map- it probably took us longer, since we are us). Maybe I’ll manage to NOT take months to make the next entry.