With the promise of the only dry and potentially sunny day for the next seven days, we bunged a load of clothes in the washing machine and spent the morning waiting for it to dry. How exciting life can be on the road….
After lunch we drove Eileen down to Newquay as we didn’t really fancy walking 4 kms along a very narrow lane and then a main road with no footpath. We parked at the top of Church Street and then strolled down to the Harbour, past a house that I may have visited as a child. My Uncle Tom used to live in the house, along with his parents, brother and sister. The front room on the left used to be a sub branch of Barclays Bank and his father was the manager, the rest of the building was their home. It’s now a private house and still looks a bit lopsided with two front doors and different styles of windows. Uncle Tom’s sister, Catrin has written a book about Newquay and their life growing up there and I can now picture her and her two brothers riding their blue tricycle down the rather steep hill that Church Street is; I wonder how many scraped knees and crashes must have occurred.
Newquay is a tidy little town, and we enjoyed a good stroll around along the harbour wall and along the Glanmor Terrace to the far end of the beach. We made sure we had an ice cream in hand; chocolate with Cointreau flavour for me……mmm yummy.
Back up at the campsite, we whipped up a quick dinner and then settled down to the classic movie ‘The Lion In Winter’, Rodney slept through some of it, but it was as good as I remembered and I enjoyed the brilliant acting from Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn.
On Sunday morning we left the campsite near Cross Inn and continued our expedition further north to Aberystwyth. It would appear that almost every village we passed through had a parish church because they all started with a Llan; Llanarth, Llwycelyn, Llyswen, Llanon, Llansantffraid, Llanrhystud, Llanddeiniol and Llanfarian, I couldn’t believe there were so many! Whenever we got a glimpse of the ocean it looked very uninviting with ‘white horses’ a long way out to sea. Finally the scenery started to “hill up a bit”, as Rodney called it and then we found ourselves in Aberystwyth.
We parked at the northern end of the promenade and crazily decided to struggle up to the top of Craig Glais. It was an incredibly blustery day and the wind actually helped to push me up to the peak, but then I thought it was going to blow me off the top and out to sea. When we got back down to the promenade we foolishly decided to walk, against the wind, to the opposite end of the promenade.
Halfway along we ducked in to the amusement arcade on the Royal Pier, to give our ears and eyes some relief and then we tried to walk a bit further, but gave up as the drizzle was now trying to become rain. When we nipped into a coffee shop for hot drinks and cakes, the rain started bucketing down and then, when it eased a bit, we strolled back to Eileen. Out of curiosity we drove down to the far end of the promenade, past the castle ruins, past the huge ‘Angel of Victory’ war memorial and we watched the brown and foaming waves churning about at the entrance to the small harbour. We were definitely in a very wet and windy corner of Wales and it definitely feels like Autumn.
Our campsite for the night was at Devils Bridge so we drove up the Rheidol Valley, which is apparently a very scenic drive, but we couldn’t really see anything through the driving rain, maybe we’ll see a bit of it when we drive down the other side of the valley on Monday.
