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.

Day 74: Salcombe and Dartford

More Devon Today.

Also trying to find an AirBnB in the Bournemouth Poole area for Day 75/76 is proving tricky. Either they had no vacancies or they were for group occupancy and ran into hundreds of pounds for one night. Never mind we will find somewhere suitable. Tonight at least, we are sorted staying on a small holding near Axminster.

But first of all the little town of Salcombe: the busy, crowded, Chelsea and Kensington-on-sea little town of Salcombe. Oh dear.

I thought it was sad enough in St. Ives but here was possibly worse. In Estate Agency windows it was hard to find anything for sale under £1.5million. A tiny 2 up and 2 down cottage in need of renovation was £480.000 In a part of the country where work is seasonal how was a local supposed to be able to buy? Quite simply they probably can’t. All we heard around us were ‘Hooray Henries’ and their Charlotte, Caroline and Emma wives braying about what a bore it was that they couldn’t park their 4x4 in the high street and had to use the car park like the rest of us. The clothes shops said it all really:  Musto, Joules, Cath Kidston, Crew..... there was even a boat park in the harbour for the rubber boat yacht tenders.

It was extremely pretty and there were flowers everywhere. Ros remembered it well as she did a lot of capsizing there when she was learning to sail in the early days of her yachting but she remembered it as it was then and not how it is now. 

Although it still has an active shell fishing industry, its main income is from tourism: leisure boating, paddle-boarding and kayaking. Salcombe has numerous regattas during the summer that must bring visitors in their droves. I wonder where they all park?  It also has wonderful walking routes as it is on the South West Coast path, something else Ros has done in the past.

Dartmouth was a much bigger town, lots of shops, narrow streets and the ubiquitous fudge.

This one is a franchise and we could see why it was popular. You could watch it being made on the premises.

Dartmouth lies at the mouth of the River Dart guarded by 600 year old Dartmouth Castle. Although it is a narrow estuary it is a deep one and well sheltered because of that very narrowness and the town has been home to the Royal Navy since the days of Edward III. 

It’s harbour has seen many famous departures from England from the Crusades to more recent times when the Americans left here for the d day landings in France during World War 2.

It still has a famous Naval college but today it welcomes tourists to enjoy the town, the countryside and the river. There are still a few old timbered buildings in the town.

We just caught sight of the Dartmouth stream train that takes travellers along the shoreline towards Totnes to visit the home of the crime writer Agatha Christie. The Greenway estate is where she lived and it is now managed by the National Trust and the easiest way to get to it is via the ferry from Dittisham. I would like to have done that too but once more we had to move onwards.

We should have found our AirBnB easily, and indeed to be fair to Unruly Sat Nav she did take us past it no less than four times! Trouble was our host, brand new to AirbnB assured us it was on the left hand side of the road and we could not miss it. Well you could miss it is you were travelling from any other direction! 

It was a lovely house where we had a self contained studio flat above a freestanding workshop with a wonderful view across their orchards and into a field where they kept. When we arrived our host was trying to dig out some moles and Ros revealed to my surprise that she was a bit of a Mole Whisperer. She suggested that he catch it, bonk it lightly on the nose and tell it firmly to go away and never come back.

It didn’t work. There were several fresh mole hills clearly in evidence on the grass the following morning. 

Day 49: Disaster day - good and bad news in equal measure

What a blooming nightmare!!

Good news: I am not imagining a problem with Gloria

Bad news: Paul took her down the hill and said that the clutch is slipping. Today is Saturday. The only garage in Ullapool is closed until Monday.

Good news: Paul says if I treat her very gently and stay in low gear and go slowly, we will get to Plockton, my next place, perfectly well.

Bad news: These are the most demanding roads in the UK. There are mountains. Gloria is struggling to get out of second gear and doesn’t want to go up mountains any more.

Good news: Much of this journey is on the level. Not nearly so many mountains as there heave been over the last five days. Saw a garage and it was open Yay!!!!

Bad news: Not a garage at all...somewhere to keep haulage truck.s

Good news: Kindly Kenny the owner tied to ring a couple of garages he knew but they were all closed. He gave me his phone number and said she should make it to Plockton but in case she didn’t he would came and get me with his tractor if I broke down. He also tested Gloria and like Paul said he thought she’d get to Plockton but to take it very gently on the hills. (He means mountains just not the Munro sort of mountains!)

Bad news: “By the way Plockton doesn’t have a garage. You’d best drive on to Kyle of Lochalsh."

Good news: We limped into Kyle - just

Bad news: It's Saturday. The garage was shut. I am supposed to be back in Plockton staying on a farm that is 9 miles outside the town in the middle of nowhere – and no way to get there. I went to the police since my car was sitting defiantly in their drive opposite the garage.

Good news: Kyle of Lochalsh has the single best police force in two men anywhere in Great Britain! Big round of applause please.

First they found me a garage that was only open because staff were about to go on another rescue mission. John the mechanic let me have a car of his for £10 a day so I can still go to Skye and the farm at Plockton and when I get back on Wednesday morning - Gloria will be sorted. And as she's a Ford not a BMW or a MERC so it will be almost affordable.

What a stressful day. I haven’t a clue about scenery or wonders to behold. Spent 80 miles

concentrating on getting my beloved little car safely to a garage. And we have. And we did.

This is my replacement car. I stalled it four times just trying to get it out of the garage onto the main road. But doubtless we will soon get used to one another.

You can see the island of Skye from the Kyle of Lochalsh. It is so close! I had imagined in the ‘Over The Sea to Skye’ scenario that we were talking about a distance like from England to France but far from it. There’s a rather elegant road bridge and that is how I will get there on Monday (now I have a replacement car!)

Happily I had managed to get the car to move uphill without embarrassing myself, the farm was just 9 miles away. It turns out not to be the usual sort of farm.

Graig Highland Farm is a sort of conservation farm with the usual chickens and Bonnie the goat and the less common lama. Judging by the notices pinned to the fence, families are welcome to bring their children to see the various animals and feed them. I have seen neither any of the animal, any families with or without children nor my host. 

My cabin is wooden and self contained with a bath (hurray) and main room with kitchen sitting area and dining area and one bedroom. The views are great. Not too sure about the cabin but I intend to have a long soak in the bath with a glass of something red  and then an even longer sleep. Night all.

Day 35: Taste of Grampian

Today I want to taste Scotland so I’m off to Inverurie where there is a one day food fest going on called Taste of Grampian.  I am up for that. 

On route I passed yet another ghastly housing development that I have been increasingly seeing in this part of Scotland. 

B......Homes the builder claims they are building ‘exceptional luxury family homes’ and the graphic they are using on their advertising hoardings is of a young well-heeled couple, strolling hand in hand through a leafy woodland. There must be a case for Trades Descriptions legislation here. No, where is there anything like a leafy woodland in eyeshot? Just an ugly conurbation, cream coloured houses with grey titled rooves crammed together with no differentiation, imagination or soul. Not even enough space between them to plant one leafy tree, let alone a whole woodland. There seems to be plenty of land in Scotland. What a pity no-one is really thinking about creating exceptional  homes for people. I am equally sceptical about the 'luxury' part of it too. 

I had time to think about this because not until a couple of miles from Inverurie, was there any signage for the event. Then suddenly on the fast and busy A90 I came to an abrupt standstill. Along with hundreds of other vehicles, Gloria and I crawled one car length at a time at no miles per hour, for nearly an hour.  No wonder they hadn’t really advertised – they didn’t need to.

There were literally thousands of visitors and once we got to the venue, The Thainstone Centre, it was all exceptionally well organised. £5 bought me my entry for the day and free car parking. At no other event so far since before Northumberland, had I seen so many people.

The stalls were many and varied;

Meat in abundance and fish

Wine, oils and whiskey 

I found Mrs. Smith from Haddo with her 800 flower topped cupcakes

And if we are naming names, Donald Trump was there in spirit advertising his Golf Spa. 

His staff were SO looking forward to meeting him in the flesh when he flies into Scotland next week.

There were celebrity chefs strutting their stuff

 

And a craft tent also showing and selling locally made art work.

Most of the food was packaged and ready to go.... 

except these...

These are award winning Bronze Turkeys and they are going nowhere soon. 

All this nibbling and slurping samples made me thirsty for a proper cup of tea, but the queues were too long so I decided to slope off to investigate Inverurie. 

Nice little town with lots of established  family owned individual businesses and riverside walks. 

I found a delightful tea shop off a side street.

 

It was a music school, a second hand book shop and a cafe. It also sold musical instruments, second hand vinyl records and sheet music.

The other tea drinkers were an older couple. She was a ex-Findhorne community member and he was an ex-South African. Both were now living in Elgin having travelled to the Taste of Grampian on their bus passes. They gave me a list of suggested ‘must see and must do’ for my forward journey before rushing off to catch their bus home. 

Time for me to head back too. 

Before I left this morning I had mentioned to Vishnu and Rebecca where I had intended to spend the day and she said she had also hoped to exhibit.  However the organisers had refused her on the grounds her stand would be inappropriate. Really? Was she selling illegal highs? Puppies on a spit perhaps? No. She represents Vegetarian Outreach Scotland. At a food fair how is that inappropriate?. 

The Taste of Grampian was definitely flesh heavy but surely balanced views and choice can only be a good thing. If I were a betting person I would say she has a case against the organisers for discrimination. You can check her out for yourself: www.vegetarianoutreachscotland.co.uk

Rebecca had also suggested that I visit another stone circle on my way back to Old Slains. 

This is Aquhorties Stone Circle. Aberdeenshire is full of castles and stone circles. This one is known because it has a recumbent stone lying horizontally on purpose, not because it met with an accident or fell over. 

They are not tall either, just a little taller than me. Not nearly as dramatic as the stones in the Outlander series, but that's probably because these are the real deal and not stage props for a Canadian film company.

My last evening at Old Slains Castle and I was met at the gate by some of the happy residents.

All I have to do now is to decide whether to share the location of this wonderful place with everyone else, or keep it as my little secret!