The rain which returned yesterday late afternoon remained with us overnight. Today’s weather guess was for a brighter afternoon but instead we’ve got clouds descending ever lower and further rain, originally on and off, now seemingly persistently. With weather forecasts this good, I really don’t know why they bother issuing any. Their guess for Saturday and Sunday is for continued rain, mostly heavy with some lighter spells, but rain all day both days nonetheless. There is only so much entertainment one can derive from sitting inside Guillaume, delightful though he is. Sudokus all begin to look the same after an hour or so. The prospect of two more stir-crazy days is too much. We have admitted defeat and have decided to pull out tomorrow. Guillaume is coming home early, tomorrow, Saturday. 

I’ve phoned the Dulverton campsite, which was to be our port of call for next week, and cancelled our reservation. We see no point spending a further £25 a night to watch rain falling.

Drat!

Yesterday’s threat of rain continued into this morning. Hoping that things might be better at the coast and with my wanting to exercise my legs into submission, we headed for Ilfracombe and Torrs Park for another stab at the Coast Path. Irritatingly, off shore the skies were a little brighter (i.e. light grey) but overhead the skies remained leaden. Torrs Park has what appears to be the only free National Trust car park in the vicinity. I’m wondering how people manage to amass enough change to keep feeding the machines at various different car parks. Possibly, though, they tend to just park in one all day long, being more regular beach goers than us. What we want is an hour or two here and there. The Coast path here was pleasant enough but a touch slippery, given the recent rain. It served a purpose and got my legs some exercise, though.

Safely back at the car, Francine was keen to call into the local LIDL. For Francine’s hair, the correct hair goop is critical and LIDL has some that proved successful and at a much lower price than her usual shampoo and conditioner. Whilst there, we tried to get ingredients for dinner at the same time. Dinner, we thought, with a couple of chicken breasts languishing in Guillaume’s fridge, could either be chicken fajitas or a Thai green curry. I began well by finding flour tortillas for fajitas. Now, where were the spices? I found them, such as they were. The LIDL spice selection amounted to little more than pepper, both black and white, hot paprika, dried basil and dried parsley. (Dried parsley is completely useless and should never be used under any circumstances.) There was nothing that one might expect as a spice staple: no ground coriander, no cumin, no cinnamon, no ginger, for example. Neither were there any of those boxed fajita kits that every other supermarket carries and, though there was sour cream, there was nothing resembling guacamole or salsa so I couldn’t do a DIY job. I changed tack, replaced the flour tortillas and started looking for coconut milk for the green curry alternative. Coconut milk? Dream on! So, no chance of any fresh basil and fresh coriander, then. I did, however, rather bizarrely find bottles of pickled ginger for sushi. So, there was little that I would have expected as basic necessities but there were unpredictable things that I would not have expected, being much more specialist. How on earth does anyone shop in a LIDL? A local lady overhead my disparaging remarks and pointed us to a Tesco just out of town. Bliss! Coconut milk, fresh basil, fresh coriander – green curry it is.

The skies remained steadfastly leaden.

Some years ago cars began baring model names featuring punctuation marks. Weird! First, I think, was the ground-breaking Kia Cee’d. What on earth is an apostrophe doing in a car name? Then along came VW with their trendy named Up! I believe there is now a hybrid version called an e-Up!, which, despite my not knowing what the hell an exclamation mark is doing in a car name, I think is brilliant. If there isn’t an e-Up!, there damn well should be. Car names, however, have just been playing catch up with town names. Is there any more curiously named town around than Westward Ho!? There’s a 21A bus that runs crawls through Bottleneck to Westward Ho!, its destination board shouting the fact. For want of something better to do, we went for a look.

I’d had visions of salty old square-rigged sailors setting out on Hornblower-like adventures from Westward Ho! It’s the romantic in me. It was surely named in such an age. My romantic hopes, as is so often the case, were dashed. As we approached the front, there was a marked lack of salty old seafarers’ cottages. There was no crumbling harbour in which to hoist any mains’l. What there was a collection of modern looking buildings together with ice cream vendors and fish and chip shops. That stalwart British holiday makers were sitting doggedly on the beach, wrapped up and sometimes behind windbreaks, under those still steadfastly leaden skies.

Westward Ho! itself doesn’t even face west. There is a good length of beach above Westward Ho! that faces west but the town itself does not. if it faces any direction at all, it faces north. If the town was desperate for an exclamation mark, it should have been called Northward Ho! [Now, since the exclamation mark at the end of that sentence is an integral part of the town’s name, featuring even on bus destination boards, how should I correctly finish such a sentence? With a full stop after the exclamation mark? Just a thought.]

Further back along the coast we found Appledore. Appledore was considerably less touristy, having a harbour rather than a beach. Here there were narrow alleyways which might at soem point have seen old salts wandering about. It also sported an appealing Deli with some local cheeses. We bought a couple to try and t headed back through Barnstaple. The rain returned more easily than did we. It was rush hour and Barnstaple was gridlocked. We couldn’t get to the back road that avoids Bottleneck so we had to head for Bottleneck. Mercifully, everyone was now trying to come south through Bottleneck so our northward journey was reasonably pain free.

One of our new local cheeses, Exmoor Blue, tastes the way a cow shed smells. Not my favourite, frankly. Back to Blue Stilton.

All day.

The sun was shining again. We headed off to investigate a few coastal spots.

Woolacombe lies to the west of us and sports a wide expanse of sand facing west into any rollers that might have arrived on our shores from the Atlantic. Like its brethren on the north coast of Cornwall, it is a magnet for surfers who seem to find it amusing to paddle away from shore and sit waiting for a decent wave to ride for a couple of seconds. Repeat. Being flat and rather featureless, other than heaving with surfers, It does not form a photographically interesting coastline.

Without pause, we continued north along the coastal road which eventually climbed up into an attractive village called Mortehoe. Mortehoe does not have beaches but cliffs, so is much more our scene. At the entrance to the village car park (£1 an hour) was a sign indicating various walks along to and around said cliffs. We opted for £2-worth to enjoy something we hadn’t really done since we were last in Cornwall, a coast path walk. Still suffering from my accursed plantar fasciitis since December last year, I was a little apprehensive to see how things would go but this is basically something that you simply have to grin and bear. I took a trekking pole to assist.

Walking out of the village past the local cemetery overlooking the waves below, I couldn’t help but think that a little more coastal erosion could see these dearly departed soles being buried for a second time … this time at sea. The coastal scenery here was much more breath-taking with cliffs descending to craggy rocks, waves and seagulls crying atmospherically. Sheep, strangely relaxed at our presence, stared at us with an uncharacteristic lack of interest as we passed; whilst not exactly running scared, sheep normally saunter away to gain space. I was doing well on the level and on any descents. The same was not true when it came to climbing back up those descents. Here, it was not my right PF foot that was causing problems but my left knee which began whingeing and feeling a little less than secure. Having had eight months at less than my normal level of activity, various other body parts grumble when pressed into sudden action. Plantar fasciitis really is a bastard condition that western medicine seems powerless to address. Note to self: I really must adopt more of the grin-and-bear it attitude.

Lee, on the northern coast, was another cove that Francine was interested in investigating. We changed out of our walking boots and set off. “There’s a narrow road or a wider road we could go down”, said Francine.  Narrow Devon roads are an education; they are frequently not only narrow, a single track with passing places, but lined with hedgerows hiding unforgiving rock walls. we opted for the wider option. The wider option turned out to be a single track road with the occasional passing place. Most worrying was grass growing down the middle of the road. Beware roads with grass down the middle. Eventually, we arrived unscathed at Lee itself. The car park was full – over full actually, with some plonker parked blocking half the entrance into it and another driver with his hopes dashed reversing back out of it. ‘T was difficult to imagine quite what the alternative narrower road down into Lee might actually have been like but somehow I managed a 3-point turn at the bottom of it so we could retrace our steps and run the single track, grass adorned gauntlet back out. Lined with steep cliffs to the east and west, Lee was such that there’d be no evening light falling into it anyway.

In the early evening we set off to see what Croyde Bay was like. This necessitated going back through Braunton, site of our northbound traffic jam on our way in. Now we hit a southbound traffic jam of half a mile or so on our way out. Eventually we made it to the traffic lights and turned right, a.k.a. west. Now we saw a real traffic jam. Croyde Bay is another surfer magnet. The surfers were largely now heading home, or trying to. They were stuck in another of Braunton’s jams stretching for a mile and a half or so. With just a handful of vehicles getting through the lights on each change, they were going to be there for some time. We have renamed Braunton; it is now called Bottleneck.

It’s damn difficult to get anywhere in this little neck of north Devon. The small roads are little more than cart tracks and the larger roads are clogged with surfers and holiday makers. Croyde Bay was predictably rather uninteresting (unless you are a surfer) and, desperate to avoid another brush with Bottleneck, we picked our way back to Guillaume along some cart tracks.

The walk at Mortehoe had been fun.

School summer holidays, the worst time of year when Satan’s Little Disciples are out and about making the planet uninhabitable for civilized adults. This is a time of year that we normally stay at home hiding. Complete escape is impossible, of course, because even local food shopping becomes a trial as the disciples run riot around supermarkets in the unrestrained fashion that seems to be the mark of modern parenting. Don’t control them or correct them but let the little sods “express” themselves freely. What bollocks!

For some reason, this year we have broken with our tradition of many years standing and have booked in to a couple of campsites in the southwest for almost two weeks. This is totally out of character and is either an act of complete madness or of desperation. Actually, it was driven by desperation (we’ve been at home for 4 or 5 weeks now and are getting stir-crazy) and will doubtless turn out to be complete madness. Since school holidays push prices up, one normally ends up paying through the nose to live in what has become a playground. Maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised. Stranger things have been known. It’s quite exciting in a scary kind of way.

Our first port of call is a Caravan Club campsite just outside Ilfracombe, Devon. Being an area we are not very familiar with, it’s quite an interesting prospect and Francine has earmarked a couple of spots of the north Devon coast to investigate for photographic opportunities. Our target campsite has no sanitary block which we’re hoping may help keep most families away. Regrettably, it looks as if the site also lacks any Wi-Fi which these days may keep even more people away.

A leisurely start saw us on the road by about 9:30 AM. My first surprise was the lack of traffic on the roads. Rush hour had dissipated and I suppose that, leaving on a Monday, most people that intended to be away for this week would already have travelled and be there. Our journey down to the junction of the M4 and M5 motorways near Bristol was a dream, relative to normal travel in Britain, that is. Then we stopped. It’s always the same around Bristol, you simply cannot funnel almost the entire westbound contents of the M4 together with the entire southbound contents of the  M5 without causing problems. After about 10 minutes of stop-start things eased up a little and traffic began flowing again.

Traffic continued to flow freely until we got to within about 10 miles of our destination. We had negotiated Barnstaple, the main town in these parts, without too much difficulty but then we stopped again. There is but one major-ish road into this corner of north Devon and there is a modestly sized town on it called Braunton. A single crossroads controlled by a set of traffic lights that seem to spend about 50% of their time on all red caused havoc heading north.

We eventually broke through the other side of the traffic light jam and pitched up at about 3:00 PM. Our site is only about half full. The warden told us it’s never full so maybe the lack of sanitary block and Wi-Fi is working some magic. There’s a couple of families with rugrats and one more with disciples but at first sight it doesn’t look too bad. We found Guillaume what appears to be a relatively calm side pitch near the entrance and set up.

It’s sunny!

We went for a first early evening look at Ilfracombe. As well as countless fish and chip shops, Ilfracombe has a harbour guarded by a bizarre statue/sculpture which I believe is called Verity by Damien Hirst, apparently a son of this parish. Verity appears to be a pregnant lady standing on a pile of books holding a sword aloft in her left hand whilst holding scales behind her backside in her right hand. The skin of her left side is largely either missing or falling off. Go figure! If I can eventually find a Wi-Fi signal I’ll look it up. I can’t help but wonder if artists set out to convey a specific message or whether they just sling something strange together and wait for pseudo-intellectual critics to read an invented message into it. Yes, I am cynical and proud of it.

Had Francine spotted anything worth pointing her camera at, I was on a promise of a fish and chip supper. She didn’t. 🙁