Penzance (minus the pirates) Lands End and the windy little roads to St Ives

Our main destination today was Lands End which is the south western most point of the UK, but on the way decided to stop and see a few of the sites, the first being Penzance. We “paid and displayed” for only an hour in this town, and I have to say that this was even too long to stay. I’m not trying to be cynical or mean, but this place was just so darn boring and bland. It had no character and everyone we passed seemed to be off to a funeral or something, there were no smiles or happy atmosphere. Apart from an old codger who rode his bike past us and gave us a nod, no one seemed to accept our exsistance, so after a quick stroll around the water front and town we moved on.

We then arrived at a place I sadly forget the name of (but vow to find out) which had an amazing outdoor amplitheatre that was built by an elderly lady and two gardners back in the days of the war. This theatre is carved into the side of a cliff and has an amazing back drop of the Atlantic Ocean and some amazing cliff faces, it’s just stunning! While we (smuggled) and ate our lunch here we watched as staff set up equipment for a band who are to perform tomorrow night. It was nice to get a rough idea of how they set up for performances and where they place various equipment, I found it all really interesting and made me realise how much I miss doing creative and performing arts. I vowed to myself that once we get home I’ll take up something creative once more!

After this wonderful detour we head off to Lands End. Again it was an amazing coastal line of cliffs, ocean and wind. You can’t go anywhere around here without gale force wind, which after a while really gives you the pips! We were practically blown to the cliff top that is the very most south western tip where we took photos of the coastal line and took time to discover some of the little paths and rocky areas that make up this attraction. It was nice here, but as I said, after a while you get over the wind and all you want to do is get the hell out of it, so we really didn’t end up staying quite as long as we could have on a nice clear, calm day.

We decided to go back to Newquay via St Ives which meant travelling on some tight little windy roads. While these roads weren’t so fun to be on, they certainly weren’t as bad as we had been expecting. So many people had told us that these roads were awful and ‘death traps’ and I could see how they might be if you were travelling fast and an irresponsible driver (or if you encounted one of these said drivers) but they weren’t as horrid as we were anticipating, thankfully!

We made it back to Newquay in time for the ‘almost free parking’ (two pounds to park over night in a carpark, bit of a rip off seeing as it doubles as the accommodations carpark and on their web site it’s classed as “free parking”) Quick bite to eat at the Walkabout pub (def the cheapest pub meals we’ve come across yet) and back to the room to read, write, people watch from our window and generally chill out!