We completed our grand tour of the South West in the middle of September as planned.
We stayed at Lyme Regis first, arriving on a bright sunny Sunday afternoon. We then moved on to Penzance, staying in an old victorian B&B overlooking the bay. We chose a route across Dartmoor, but were a bit disappointed as most of it was wooded, and didn’t get to see much of the moorland. Tavistock proved an interesting place to stop on the way for coffee and cake. We did a bit of exploring, I went out to the Porthcurno telegraph museum one day leaving Michelle to her shops and we also went to Newlyn Bay, Mousehole, Lands End, Falmouth, Truro, and St Ives. We also went to Eden project, the picture of Michelle was taken inside the tropical “Geome” at the Eden Project.

We then carried onto Lynton, having to negotiate some interesting switchback junctions in order to get up to Lynton from the main road! It would make agood place for exploring Exmoor, but we’d been here before so just enjoyed the peace and quiet after the bustle of Penzance. We then trekked up the atlantic highway and then onto our base in the
Cotswolds near Chipping Campden.

The roads in the Cotswolds have some nice views, but everywhere has the air of “Godshill”. We struggled a bit with the bike at the B&B too, stuck in the middle of no-where on a blind bend and on steeply cambered road. with the promised “flat” parking area 200 yards uphill on a dirt track. There’s a good pub in Chipping Campden called the Lygon Arms, well worth stopping for. We stopped in various places (Bourton on the water, Stowe on wold etc) but we didn’t think that much of the Cotswolds apart the scenery, so we shook the dust from our boots and journeyed back to Island via the old Fosse Way. very scenic route though not many bends.

We covered about 700 miles in all, and best of all, missed the rain whilst on the road on all but one occasion.