Saturday Touring in the rain
Anneke and I toured around Cornwall in the RAIN. First, we went to the Eden Project which is a revamped mine. You can’t believe that just a few years ago, this was an ugly scar on the landscape. (Northern MN should take note.)
It has the largest greenhouse in the world. We were lucky in that the first hour or so, there was no rain so we were able to walk around outside.
When it started raining, we moved in to have a bite to eat and then walked through the Tropical (largest) greenhouse. Incredible! My camera lens constantly fogged up when I took the lens cap off.
We then headed to Foway (pronounced Foy I was smartly told by Simon, my colleage at UMN). At one point, we went the wrong way and mistakenly thought Par was Foway and I kept saying “Foway sucks� because it was just a port. But we realized our mistake when we ended up at the same highway (the road we were on was a half circle) and we tracked back and saw the turn for Foway. Foway was very pretty, as you can see, though it was raining and very hilly and steep and there was no parking except in car parks at the top of the hill so we just drove around.
We were about to leave but found our way down to the water by following signs to the ferry. We looked at the map more closely and were sad to see that we had to detour back around this water inlet – likely about 45-55 minutes to get over the water where we wanted to continue our tour. As we sat in the car in the parking lot looking across the water, even seeing a road that ended in the water, surmising that people let boats off there, we happened to see cars driving onto a ferry. We both realized, “A ferry!!� For some odd reason, though we followed the signs down here by following signs for the ferry, we didn’t actually realize there was a car ferry. We drove quickly out of the parking lot to get over to the ferry and I just drove on. Anneke wondered how much it would be and if I should get on. I said, I don’t care if it is 10 pounds, we are taking it! It ended up being 2 pounds. We were so happy to go across on the ferry and it made our day!
We continued on along the coast and went to Polperro next. It was 5pm and, in this town, you have to again park at the top and walk down into the town. It was pouring rain again, and Anneke was trying to make a deal with mother nature for 30 minutes of no rain in exchange for rain all night. It rained the whole time we walked down into the town, and it was desolate. We went into a pub and had a half-pint and rested.
Then we returned to our car and headed back to our cottage where I took a 20 minute nap because I was absolutely exhausted from teaching.
We then had dinner in a small town called Saltash just near our cottage. The ambiance could have been better but the food was good.