I’ve assembled a few of the best photos to share with you and will try to limit my writing to the highlights. I’ll start by saying that we both had a really great experience. We spent most of our time in Devon, and most of that in very secluded places. We arrived in London at 7am, got to our Hotel at 9 and couldn’t check in until 1. We had not slept since leaving Boise, 15 hours before. So, we got on a double-decker tour bus and toured the city for a couple of hours. We were like zombies, but we did see all the familiar places – Piccadilly, Trafalgar square, Buckingham palace, Baker Street…. We left for Bath the next day, stayed in a really cool guest house, and began our food/ale/history/cream tea extravaganza in earnest. We somehow managed to get ourselves to Shumaker College, on the Dartington Estate, Totnes in time for Amy’s classes. I wrote from there last.
After we left the college, we stayed on in Totnes for a night, above an inn that has had to start playing super loud music to attract younger patrons. It thumped and pounded until midnight. Here is a picture of the place, followed by a couple more of the inns we stayed in.
This is where things changed. I had been studying English roads, signs, and driving habits for a while. After Totnes, I had to put it all into practice. Our first driving experience was frantic, nerve wracking,and confusing. All 30 miles of it. We squeezed into a parking spot in Beer and left the car there for the next two days while we explored and ate. Beer, for me at least, was probably the highlight of the trip. The ocean pictures below are all from there. We did some hiking along the coastal cliffs. After Beer, we drove to north Devon where it got really remote (for England). Here we stayed at a farm, visited two others, and stayed in a charming old mill (the new addition was added in the 1600’s) that’s now a B&B run by an eccentric old lady who insisted on serving tea in bone china – it just tastes better that way. She sent us up the road one night for dinner at the Fox and Goose, a great little pub where I had rabbit.
In Exmoor park, we hiked a few miles on the moor out to the ruins of a medieval village. In the afternoon, we walked the river down from our inn for a mile or so and had tea at a National Trust Victorian stone house set along the river bank. Here’s a photo –
Watersmeet
We visited an impossibly quaint fishing village named Clovely. It’s actually a private town now, and we had to pay to get in, but it certainly was unique. Here are a couple from there –
Clovely, click to enlarge
I'm going to include and image and a video clip that need a bit of explaining. The first was something we stumbled upon one day in Salisbury (where we sat in the cathedral for evensong for about 30 minutes). These old, and young, blokes dress up like this to perform some sort of loosely practiced dance to pop or rock music, and jiggle their pom-poms. They are slow and out of sync, but seemed to be dedicated. I could not for the life of me figure this one out until I saw the people working the crowd for coins – it was all to raise money for charity. I think they travel the country.
The next is a short video clip we shot because we felt nobody would believe a verbal description of our driving experiences. I know I wouldn’t believe anything so crazy sounding. We felt like rats in a maze, with 30 million other rats all franticly looking for an exit, and driving 3 tons of metal. There’s also a photo of our little red car.
Video -
The final batch of photos are just images really. The only one that might need a little explanation is the Haunch of Venison – an old pub in Salisbury.
Cheers!
