slowly she turned

Late Friday morning, we took a train from Paddington Station in London to Penzance, a ride that took 5-6 hours. I did not take any photos from the train, but the views became lovelier the closer we got to our destination, with pretty villages and the harbours of Portsmouth out the window.

One thing that had changed since Sandy and I took the train to Exeter in 2017 was that the seat assignments were shown on a digital screen above each row of seats. If you didn’t have an assigned seat, then you were to look at the screens and take an available seat, or an empty seat when we had passed the station and the passenger had obviously not boarded. I thought this was a great idea, but people pretty much ignored it. We usually had to ask people to move out of our assigned seats, and later someone told us that that was pretty much the norm when we had to hunt down unassigned seats on a crowded train back to London. It was never a problem. On the train and on the Tube, people were generally very polite and even offered up their seats to us.

(Guess that means we are senior citizens, for sure, now!)

Once we got to Penzance, I found that my belief that we could use Uber in Cornwall was very, very wrong. We caught a taxi from the train station to our little apartment near the harbor and promenade, and discovered that we could have easily walked it, even with our luggage. Views from my upstairs bedroom:

We had wanted Indian food for a while, and we found a great Indian restaurant just up the street from us on Chapel St. It had an unusual menu in which you chose from a long list of sub-menus of a main dish and lots of side dishes. You could also let the chef decide for you. The food was great – one of the best that we had in the United Kingdom.

Those are some spicy rims on our drinks.