Author: Laurie

On Sunday morning, Susan and I relaxed in our cozy cottage while Lisa went to church at the chapel across the street from us. We finished our laundry, since we packed for a week, doing carry-on luggage only for our trip.

Since this would be our only day when we could have a traditional British Sunday roast, we headed to the Turks Head for lunch. A huge lunch. A wonderful lunch, with Yorkshire pudding and the works.

That afternoon, we took a taxi to St. Michael’s Mount. Getting a taxi in Cornwall, we found, took a lot more effort that we anticipated! But we made it there in plenty of time to take a boat over (it was high tide), and hike up to the castle, which was steeper and more treacherous than I remembered from our trip in 2017. The gardens alone are worth the trip over there, and the views are amazing.

Inside the castle, the guide took a photo of Lisa and I under the Arundell family crest in the Chevy Chase Room. No, not the actor, it refers to the plaster frieze around the walls, which was based on a song titled “The Ballad of Chevy Chase.” The Arundells are our direct ancestors.

Susan goofs for the camera in front of this modern sculpture of St. Michael offering mercy to the devil after defeating it, placed on top of an original medieval plinth in the castle chapel.

While we waited for our taxi in Marazion, we had ice cream from this little shop.

The building across from where we waited had a painting on it that looked like real flowers. I also liked the Mad Tea Party painting.

We were all exhausted when we returned, so we got takeout from a Chinese restaurant around the corner, and packed up for our journey to Port Isaac the next day.

I slept late while my sister and friend headed down to the harbour for coffee. Once I got up, we decided that we needed a few groceries and so we walked down the Promenade to the Lidl. On the way, we stopped for a light lunch at a little cafe/bakery/ice cream shop called the Art Cafe. I had a cheese scone with chutney, and that simple lunch was one of the best meals I had. It was an absolutely gorgeous day. Even though there was still a chill in the air, people were swimming.

We took some time to noodle around on a beach and around the rock pools.

May is a perfect time to visit the British Isles if you love wildflowers. The photo below was taken looking down at the building under our patio.

We found out much later that collecting pebbles on the beach is a no-no. For this avid rockhound, that’s like offering heroin to an addict and then snatching it away. The pebbles were amazing in variety and beauty. Look at the image of a blackbird on the rock in the corner.

We had to remove the pebbles from the window sill because a very aggressive, huge seagull thought they were food and was attacking the window.

Lisa and I took a walk around the center of town around 3:30-4 and found that most of the shops closed at 3 or 4 p.m., which was a surprise on a Saturday! We did find a cute gift shop with unusual items and a nice bookshop.

That night we went out pub hopping and our first stop was the Turks Head, a 13th century pub just up the street.

We had dinner across the street at the Artist Residence hotel restaurant.

In hindsight, even though I enjoyed this day immensely, I might have done things differently. The reason I picked Penzance as the first place to land in Cornwall was so we could easily travel by train or car to nearby places in southern Cornwall such as Mousehole and St. Ives, but there wasn’t enough time. I was weary, a bit sick, and my knee still ached from my tumble in the museum several days before, so I really needed a break. Lisa helped me do the exercises to fix my vertigo (it is from ear crystals getting out of place in my inner ear, and the exercise is called the Epley maneuver.) It was a lovely day, but there were missed opportunities that we wouldn’t have a chance to do later on. They will happen on a future trip, because I will always want to go back to Cornwall.

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.