The Cornwall Experience - Day 1

The kids had some time off from school so we packed up on Friday night and set off early Saturday morning for the southwest tip of England. We stopped first in the town of Cheddar and took a hike up a trail to view Cheddar Gorge. Yes, this is where the cheese comes from and every other shop sells cheese. There is a town called Beer nearby that I had to resist visiting :-)

We had our first Cornish pasties and a local tea shop. The owner complained about the new American visa requirements and how it meant his grandaughter wouldn't be able to visit him now due to huge delays in processing. But overall a very helpful guy, he told us which path to take to avoid the tourist toll up to the trails, and to watch out for the rare bread of shaggy goats we would find at the top of the hill.





After hiking a while and witnessing some lovely views, we carried on to our next destination...Glastonbury. This town is your atypical granola atmosphere (plenty of nuts and flakes). We toured the Abbey ruins, which just happened to have a church service on...the kids really admired that these people still went to church with half the walls fallen down and no roof!

Eventually, we made our way towards St Just, which is near Land's End. We stayed at the youth hostel, which we know from experience these are not always easy to find. In this case that would be an understatement... I had the GPS coordinates and general directions from the YHA website. However, this road just got smaller and smaller, until I'm driving down a farm lane with walls on either side and overgrowth scraping the sides of the car. There was no where to turn around so I just kept driving, but we lost daylight and it started raining...and felt the situation could only get worse. I started backing out of the lane until a car came up behind me... ok. So onward forward, and the path splits 3 ways with no markings as to which one I should follow. I chose the widest one which turned out to be wrong. I followed this for a while till I found a comfortable place to park and call the hostel. They straightened me out and I went back to the split and took the correct path. Eventually we found it and checked into our family room. In the morning we found out what a special place this is when we saw the view.