Devon: Jam first, or cream?

Our trip to Cornwall was eventful and we ended up having to make a last minute change which put us in a picturesque village in Devon instead of in the one we'd planned in Cornwall.

We had a train trip booked on the railroad that travels between Paddington Station in London and Penzance (which I realized is a real town and not just a place with pirates in an old musical).

You can reserve seats on the train but the online booking guide doesn't give you a very clear idea of where the seats are in relation to windows and so we arrived at our coach to find out (much to Anne's horror) that we were all the way in the rear of the coach with no window.  After a few moments in the coach we were told that the coach letter C (electronic boards on the outside announce a letter matching your ticket) had been switched and we needed to move to the 3rd last coach on the train.

After we left the station I went looking for a bathroom and discovered some seats with a table that were marked as reserved from London to Penzance and were unoccupied.  We assumed that the people who had booked those seats were no-shows for the trip and that we'd probably not be challenged if we sat there and so we had a desk for me to do some work on and a big wide window with a view of the countryside for Anne.

The trip between London and Plymouth (which is where we were getting off) is just over 3 hours (around 4 hours by car) but our AirBnb was booked in Downderry which is across from Plymouth in a ferry and then about a 20 min drive.

All of the car rental places in Plymouth are closed on Sundays so we planned to get to our AirBnb with public transport and then come back to Plymouth on Monday to get a rental car for the rest of our time in the South West.

 

 

We arrived at Plymouth Station at about noon and made our way to a bus stop where we were told we'd be better off getting a taxi to the ferry.  The taxi fare wasn't too expensive and we were dropped at the entrance to the ramp of the ferry within a few minutes of hailing a cab at the train station.

 

The ferry to Torpoint (the first Cornish town across from Plymouth) is free for pedestrians in both directions and free for cars entering Cornwall - you pay to leave. 

It started to rain as the ferry crossed the bay and when we got off I suggested that we go up to the pub at the top of the hill for some food.

As we went in with our two bags of luggage each, all eyes turned towards us and the bar fell silent.  One of the patrons called out to us: "Are you looking for food?"  - we said we were and he told us that there weren't any places around there that sold food, but we could go to a restaurant about 15min walk away but it would be closed in about an hour.  

I suggested to Anne that we get a pint of beer each and try to figure out what to do next.  It gave us a chance to catch our breath before we headed out to see if we could make it to the restaurant in time for a sandwich or something.

At the bus-stop on the way to the restaurant we discovered that the bus which the AirBnb host had said we should use didn't run on a Sunday.  It was raining but we figured we could make our way over to the restaurant in our raincoats hopefully without getting too wet.  This turn of events was starting to worry me - we were more or less stranded with no good way to get to our AirBnb.

We arrived just after they had closed but the chef told us there was a pub a little down the road from them and she'd be happy to give us a ride.  We were pretty conspicuous with our luggage and I guess she took pity on us looking bedraggled and a little lost.  On the way she tried to call a taxi to get us to Downderry and when she couldn't, she said she'd give us her number and we could call her after lunch and she'd take us to our AirBnb.

At the pub we found a table and ordered the traditional Sunday pub lunch which is a big roast.  They had an option for Anne which was a nut roast.  

Anne discovered that her phone was missing while we were waiting to be fed and after sending a text message to the chef she showed up with her partner who handed over the phone - it had slipped out of Anne's pocket onto the floor of their car!

We were really touched by the kindness they showed to complete strangers and I was determined not to bother them any further with a ride to Downderry so we asked our waiter if he knew of a cab company we could call.

An hour later we were in a cab heading to Downderry.  The roads are like those you see in the BBC crime series set in small villages with a parish priest who solves murders.  The are incredibly narrow with broad, tall hedgerows on each side.  Cars approaching each other on the road have to do this delicate dance where they look for a small amount of space in a hedge so that one of them can partially pull over to make space for the other car before they come head to head.  The cab driver said that you need to be good at reversing to drive on these roads.  I suppose it is often that you have to back up when no gaps are to be found.  We saw quite a few cars passing in this way and there doesn't seem to be a specific etiquette - I suspect both drivers start looking and the first one to spot a place to pull over does so and the other lifts a hand in thanks.

In England the postal codes are accurate enough to get you to a single house or apartment.  All we had for this AirBnb was a postal code so when the taxi dropped us off I assumed we were directly outside of the house.  We weren't.

I plugged the postal code into Google maps and we walked down the road a bit and up a massive flight of stairs to the AirBnb.  The apartment is a shipping container converted into two rooms and a bathroom.

The view from the top was amazing but our excitement was short-lived because when I set up my computer I was seeing massive data loss to common sites (around 80% packet loss) and live voice/video calls were impossible.

I had some trouble communicating this with the owner.  When the household mostly uses the internet for web browsing, social media and for streaming movies the software is pretty good at buffering to minimize the effects of intermittent loss of data so they might not even be aware of the problems.

In this case we were told it had been fine for other visitors some of whom had worked there before.  They offered to reset the router in their house down the hill and we could reset it at the top afterwards.  They were using an extender to get their internet access up to the shipping container on the hill.

I realized after everything was reset with no sign of improvement that we would have to find somewhere else to stay before my work started the next day at 2pm.

We found another AirBnb in a small town in Devon on the other side of Plymouth and we took the bus ride in the morning after arranging to get reimbursed for all but the one night.  

We almost missed the bus because we were about 2min walk from the bus stop when it drove past us.  The driver noticed our luggage and my alarmed expression when he drove past and he stopped the bus at the next corner for us to catch up and get in.

Considering that two cars coming towards each other have trouble, the bus makes for an even more interesting ride.  I told the driver at the end that he deserves danger pay!

Our stop in Plymouth to pick up the car was illuminating.  A bus driver at the ferry stop was kind enough to offer us a ride up the hill free of charge to get to the correct bus stop for where we needed to go.  This was the third act of kindness from strangers since we'd arrived over here (4th I suppose if you count the man in the bar who told us where to find food)!

It was raining for much of the time we spent in Plymouth.  The area we stopped in for coffee was marked on the map as an area of greenery but the closest it gets are the trees growing in the middle of the concrete paving.

Once we had our car we made our way on a 2 hour drive to the small town of Brixham in Devon in the area called Torbay.

I was interested in how the people of Devon and the Cornish get on and it turns out there are a few details to their rivalry although these are mostly described as light-hearted.  The most well known is whether you put the jam on your scone before the clotted cream or the other way around.  It turns out that Anne and I disagree on this point which surprised me.  I can't imagine how you spread jam on top of cream!  

One morning we stopped at a coffee shop full of memorabilia from a passenger steam ship line (Cunard) that used to ferry mail and passengers internationally in the 1950s-60s.  As of 2022 they are the only shipping company still offering a passenger service between Europe and the USA

We ordered a cream tea for 2 and one of us put the jam and cream on the scone in the correct order.

The town of Brixham is a quaint fishing town enclosing a small harbor.

We were able to go for a few walks around the town which has some obviously tourist-oriented shops.

 

The streets are narrow here as well, with parking fairly hard to find.  We were able to park our car across the street from our AirBnb for the week but it was tight up against the curb and along with the other cars parked there blocking half of the road forcing cars to single file in both directions.

There is a section of a hiking trail reachable from the city.  The trail is called the South West Coastal path and Anne had read about it in a book called "The Salt Path" by Raynor Wynn who hiked this trail with her husband after financial ruin and after his terminal health diagnosis.

We decided to find it and walk for a stretch along it.

The coastline if rugged but very beautiful.

There are stretches that run on the streets and paved paths of the towns where the path takes you through a town.  Our walk was half in the country and half in the town so we got a feel for both.

After a week in Devon we headed back to Torpoint, across the ferry, this time in the rental car and stopped again at the restaurant where we had been treated so kindly.  

The restaurant is called Woogies and we had a meal there that rated up with the best restaurant meals we've had on our travels.

From Torpoint our sights are set a small village within walking distance of Penzance in a bay on the most south-western stretch of England.