Day 75: Bournemouth and Poole

In my original plan we had been due to stay in Poole, or nearby, for two days but for some reason I could not find any Airbnb that could take two of us or none that were available for our dates. This was only the second time I had drawn a blank. The first had been at Durness on the northern coast line of Scotland but once I was there it was clear there WERE no houses, hotels of guesthouses at all.

But Bournemouth? Poole? In a conference town?

I wasn’t unduly worried as I felt sure we could just turn up and find somewhere and I spent too long this morning wasting time looking online when we could have been on the road.

Axminster was only a few miles from the place where we were and it was where my mother and her husband Fred had settled when they first married and moved away from Crawley. It was to be a retirement home in Devon, away from busy cities and where they could run a small bed and breakfast business as and when they wanted to.

In the end it was that very isolation that brought them to move back closer to their two families. Being so close and knowing how much they had liked the little town, Ros and I went into Axminster.

I scattered some of mum’s ashes round a wonderful ancient yew tree in the churchyard so that any siblings who wanted to retrace my steps and visit could find her easily.

Ros meanwhile popped into the Tourist Information Office to see if they could book ahead for us.

Unlike Visit Scotland where all their systems are joined up and one tourist office could book you accommodation in any other Scottish town for a flat fee of £4 (wonderful), English Tourist Information Offices can’t. They are not joined up and ‘are no longer a profit making organisation.’

Okay – no wonder so many are being sold off all over the country. Makes no sense at all.
 I’ll say it again – all we need to do is take the border between Scotland and England and drag it down six miles below Brighton and job done. We can all be Scots.

So Ros used her initiative and found a hotel on a phone app in Bournemouth for us for one night – at more than four times what I had paid for any of my previous stays!

Never mind – onward to the delights of Lyme Regis. Coffee was once more calling Ros.

I have visited Lyme before when I was driving a journalist friend who was doing the PR for a guest house on the main street. I think Lyme Regis is very charming. John Fowles the writer lived in Lyme Regis and his book The French Lieutenants Woman was filmed here in 1981 with Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep in the title roles. It hasn’t changed.

The Cobb harbour with its stone pier is unchanged since it was mentioned in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
Lyme is on the World Famous Jurassic Coast where, in the past, dinosaur remains have been discovered. One of the simple pleasures today is fossil hunting just under the cliffs, and if you can’t find your own there are several fossil shops in the town where you can buy one and pretend you found it.

It is exotically twinned with Bermuda because the town was the home of Admiral Sir George Somers who founded an English Colonial settlement on Bermuda.

The ’Regis’ bit comes from the town being a major port in the 13^th century and getting the Royal Charter from King Edward 1 in 1284 and again from Queen Elizabeth 1^st in 1591.

Coffee consumed, walk done, on to Dorchester .   

Except we couldn’t... there were holdup and traffic jams all the way bumper to bumper for no apparent reason. No traffic lights, no sudden fog or snow storms, no accidents. Just sheer weight of painfully slow moving holiday traffic.

A brief stop in Bridport but again this little market town was clogged to a standstill.

Ros’s original intention was to join me for a couple of days in Plymouth and then go home to Wittersham in Kent from Poole. However, the chaos that is Southern Rail these weeks in summer 2016 means she has no way of knowing whether her train will run at all, let alone if she will have to go via Paddington or whether she would be on a bus for the next 24 hours. It is about the cancellation of train guards (a second person on each train) without which the train workers union says train travel could be dangerous if ever there were an incident. It has been mayhem and disrupted services for months now.

Parking for a loo break I spotted a National Express Coach heading for Eastbourne via Portsmouth.

Minutes later I saw a removal van from my home town of Eastbourne.

Ros’s partner Crispin will be in Eastbourne tomorrow, sailing off the coast.

For a self confessed intuitive whose life is usually guided by phenomenal coincidence, it took a while to ‘get it’ but ‘2xEastbourne’ eventually struck me as ‘go 2 Eastbourne’ instead of spending two far too expensive days in Poole. Eastbourne was less than three hours away from Bournemouth. True it would make the day a rush but Ros had made an effort to come all this way to do a bit of my journey with me, crushed up against my dashboard with my computer behind her seat and only room for minimal luggage. It was the least I could do to save her the travelling time and my host in Worthing had only room for one person, not two.

But wouldn’t that mean my trip would be over before my 80 days? I would be driving straight through Worthing to get to Eastbourne would I not? We will see.

Dorchester was out.

Bridport was out  - which was a shame. I wanted to share the film location for the popular TV series Broadchurch with her. And call in on Rick Stein’s restaurant to ask him why he had decided to boycott Eastbourne. Was it a Brexit excuse? He was spared my quextions.

Bournemouth is a similar town to Eastbourne except that it has sandy beaches to our shingle. 

We found the hotel and went exploring the town. It claims to be a unique shopping experience. Slight exaggeration – nothing unique about it as far as we could tell. Much the same as every other large seaside town everywhere else in Britain. 

It had a pier. So do we. It had parks. So do we.  It had seven miles of sandy beaches. Otherwise very similar. 

It also had a ghastly monstrosity of an International Conference Centre that looked underused. 

My daughter Morgan had been there just  a week ago at a conference and Political parties use it, but today it was firmly closed. Very ugly building that seemed to take not a scrap of the landscape into consideration in the design. Who in the planning offices allows these things to be built? Not that I am judgmental or an architect of course.

Bournemouth has lovely villages round and about but again I will have to revisit at another time.

This is not what I had planned but needs must on this occasion

Tomorrow it is back to Eastbourne .....or not.