7/31 (Friday) – North Coast and St. Newlyn East, Cornwall

Today was another beautiful, blue sky day, and a touch warmer.  First order of business was to arrange to dump the Great Black Beast (as the hulking van has become to be not so affectionately known).  We drove it into Truro and picked up a much smaller and more manageable car. 

Then we headed out to the North Coast of Cornwall to St. Agnes.  The place was packed with vacationers so it was a bit difficult to get around.  We did finally succeed in finding a parking place at a hotel near the beach.  In order to park there we had to buy something so we decided to eat at the hotel’s pub, the Driftwood Spars.  Turns out the building was constructed around 1650.  Awesome!!  Old dark beams, big fireplace, tons of character.  And good food. 



Driftwood Spars Pub



From there we walked down to the nearby beach at Trevaunance Cove.  Apparently it is a popular surfing beach but the tide was waaaaaaayyyy out with little surf and a vast expanse of sand.  There were a lot of people camped out on the beach sunbathing and others frolicking in the surf.

The next stop was another coastal town a little ways up the coast from St. Agnes.  With the tide still out the beach at Perranporth was particularly massive.  Apparently at low tide it combines with the sand dunes at Penhale Point to produce a single beach that is over two miles long. 

We climbed the cliffs overlooking the beach and it was very impressive…with the area near the high water mark crammed with hundreds more people.  Since none of us brought our swimsuits and since we are old fogies we didn’t go down in the water.

Leaving the coast line we drove to St. Newlyn East.  According to the guidebooks it was supposed to be a charming old village.  In reality the village was a pretty non-descript with a lot of relatively new homes.  The only saving grace was a very charming old church with it's adjacent cemetery. 

 

 

One of the highlights of the church was the little handmade cushions in the pews, approximately one for each seat in the pew, each one different...

 And the ends of the pews were covered with lovely carvings..

Back in St. Mawes we enjoyed more views of the bay outside our hotel.

We had a very special treat late that evening.  In honor of our arrival, there was a fireworks display over the harbor right outside our windows (actually it was the kick off a week‑long festival). So we all hung out of our windows and took pictures.  Awesome ending to a wonderful day.

About driving the country-side:  Many of the two lane roads were pretty narrow - cars could pass each other slowly as long as both were hugging the edge.   Some roads are two lane with a center line that sometimes disappears when the road narrows, disconcertingly sometimes before a blind curve.  Even more disconcerting were the signs we saw a couple of times at a blind curve:    

And there were short stretches (and occasionally very long stretches) of one lane roads with two way traffic.  Fortunately these long stretches generally had wide spots in the road every so often.  The car nearest to a wide part of the road would backup/pull into the wide part to let the other car pass.  And some roads were so narrow that our small car was within inches of hitting the vegetation on both side of the lane at the same time.  

The drives were pretty however, and so was the country side when you could see it through the 10 - 20 foot tall hedgerows and the trees and bushes.