And our adventure continues! Day 40 already, we feel blessed with such a long holiday together. We’re waked at 6:45 by Zeno. We organise yesterdays clean laundry, shower and have breakfast in the sun.
There will be another heatwave in England this week, so we decided to book a pitch next to the sea in Cornwall. We have a long, 500KM drive ahead of us to our campsite for four nights in the Southern-most point of England.
We do a quick visit to the ceramic museum, although it’s closed, it still has huge ovens that look impressive from the outside. And they are familiar to us as it’s also the location of the UK television series The Pottery Throw Down, which we follow for years already.
We try to break up the long ride with a NT site halfways, but when we check to opening times we see it’s also closed today. Not our lucky day. Just an hour away is Croome Court, not really halfways but a break nonetheless.
The kids collect their final Pokemon sticker, they are the first to do so according to the volunteer. Tim visits the RAF museum, discoverig the secrets of the Second World War airbase, where In the 1940s, RAF Defford housed over 2,000 service personnel and scientists who tested radar to meet new enemy threats. The kids decide to spend their break in the playground car.
It’s 28 degrees, but there is a 270ha parkland to explore. So we stretch our ankles and throw our drinking water on our heads and depart, into the dry brown grass land with some scattered thirsty or dead trees.
We pass a small church and walk 1 KM to the main land house of the 6th Earl of Coventry, an 18th-century trend-setter who collaborated with the best new talent of the day – Robert Adam and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.
Unfortunately, the house is under restauration and there is not much to see. The kids are lucky, however, as the rooms are filled with games instead. We play some chess.
It’s lunch time, and we don’t have any food left in the car, plus we realised we went to a restaurant only once this holiday. So we treat ourselves on this day full of driving. The cafe in the house is not so nice and hidden in the basement, so we pour the final water on our heads and walk back to the main entrance to order some food and water for lunch. The kids are lucky again with « lunch boxes » consisting of a sandwich, juice, sweet yoghurt and a chocolate bar (!). Cleo searches for golden tickets as we’re reading Charlie and the Chocolate factory now.
We cannot escape the 4,5 hour drive anymore if we still want to arrive before dinner time. We turn on the music, sing Klein Orkest songs, Zeno falls asleep and Cleo plays the final games of her Okki and the letter snake game (take turns by calling a word with the same first letter as the last letter of the previous word). We pass a fire, and are sad about the super dry nature, and no rain is predicted for the coming days. Even the cows are skinny because there is no grass left. We pass the 8.000 KM mark of our trip. Will we drive more than 10.000 before we’re back in Dilbeek?😅
It’s 17:30 when we arrive on the campsite. Tim tries a quick sea dip, as our campsite has sea view and we remember this beach, we were here also two years ago. It should be a five-ten minute walk, but it takes Tim 20 instead. Not the rest for his achilles we were hoping for, but the sea is nice.
We want to take pizza for dinner. The reviews of the campsite pizza were very promising. But it seems nobody wants to work on Tuesday as the pizzeria is also closed. So we improvise a pasta with our left-over carrots and aubergine. We still have a nice time neverthless.
Also Olga tries to make it within the promised 5-10 minutes to the beach, but it takes her also 20+ minutes. She’s back at 21:45, just before it gets really dark. It, however, was a nice walk through nature.
