The Pirate Restaurant of Penzance (England, Day 2)

Today we woke up to a full English breakfast, which I’ll have photos of tomorrow because tomorrow we will take a picture before digging in. After that we set off on a whirlwind journey, covering the Minack Theater, Land’s End, St. Ives, Lizard Point, and Penzance.

The Minack Theater is an open-air theater that is built into the side of a freakin’ cliff. 

View from adjacent to the theater. Yes, it’s a long way down.

Guardrails for the actors’ safety had to be added a few years after they opened in 1931, because performing on the edge of a cliff is probably terrifying. The whole theater was built—as in, like, cleared and granite carved and moved—by one woman (Rowena Cade) and her gardener Billy Rawlings and his friend Charles Thomas Angove.

Cade ran the theater from 1931 until her death in 1983. During the hiatus caused by World War II, she crawled under the barbed wire (set up by the army to defend the coast) with her mower to cut the grass. Now THAT’S dedication.

 

Gratuitous theater porn for Diana.

We moved on to Land’s End, the extreme southwestward point in Great Britain. Land’s End to John o’ Groats, the acknowledged northeasternmost point of Scotland, is the traversal of the whole island. A ton of people take the roughly thousand-mile (838 by road, 1200 off-road) journey every year. It’s like the Amazing Race meets Top Gear and a pilgrimage all at once. People have done this journey by automobile, wheelchair, on foot wearing nothing but the clothes on their backs, on foot wearing nothing but boots… you name it, it’s been done.

End of the land at Land’s End, and requisite picture of the famous signpost. They’d put your homeplace and the distance in the sign if you posed for an official photo, but we decided to forgo that cost.

 

Two excellent signs. We COULD see  the Scillies islands. Gratuitous pun for Theo.

From there, we went to St. Ives for lunch. The streets were very narrow and confusing—the English seem to have a thing for one-lane roads. We didn’t meet anyone with an exorbitant amount of wives or sacks full of cats and their kits, but it was very nice all the same.

The beach at St. Ives—it was overcast and only in the low 60s F, but people were surfing and in their bathing suits. I guess the English are determined to holiday no matter what the weather.

In St. Ives, I had my first Cornish pasty! It was full of steak and squash and onion, and I gobbled it up before I got a picture, so I have a fun fact about Cornish pasties from Land’s End instead:

 

Heathcliff, this information may address any concerns you have about ingesting chemicals.

We went horseback riding in Mullion, on a “beach hack”—meaning we took our horses along the water. My horse, Nancy, was scared of the water, but I did get to go trotting for a bit, which made up for it. I always forget how much I love horseback riding! I didn’t take any pictures on the hack, but it was on Polurrian Bay, which you can find on googlemaps.

Lizard Point is the southernmost part of mainland Great Britain. The lighthouse and visitor’s center were closed when we got there, but I walked up to the latter and was rewarded with my favorite sign ever.

Not so secret anymore, eh?

Luckily, I made us take a walk down a wooded path, and since I took the “avoid stairs” route (my family went “via stairs”), I got a nice picture of Lizard Point looking very lizard-y.

I was going to make a guide, but my trackpad is being a massive pain. You’ll have to use your imagination a bit harder if you can't see it.

We’re guessing this is some kind of boat ramp. Other guesses included “bridge to nowhere” and “highway to the danger zone.”

We were going to have dinner somewhere fairly normal, but my dad really wanted to go to Penzance and eat “somewhere pirate-y,” which was exactly what we did. Branwell’s Mill Meadery was an excellent choice.

Tune in tomorrow for St. Michael’s Mount, Falmouth, Pendennis Castle, Mevagissey, and Eden Project!

Stonehenge & Lyme Regis

This summer, I’m doing a study abroad at Cambridge. The program starts July 5^th and ends August 9^th, but since I was going to England anyway, my family decided to take a holiday and tour around Cornwall and stuff. Despite the fact that my dad suggested this, he resisted the idea for a very long time. I don’t know how he thought this wasn’t going to happen, because we had a six-book stack of travel guides for England on our coffee table for months.

We had an overnight Virgin Atlantic flight with friendly British flight attendants. I have nothing but compliments for the airline. The whole plane was lit with a soft purple glow, the food was delicious, I saw a shooting star when we were over the ocean, and—most importantly—they loaded the plane back to front, which is the only sensible way to do it.

The fact that we were seated in the back and therefore got to board first made this even better.

It was pretty uneventful flight, but the in-flight entertainment was excellent and I watched three and a half movies. My dad’s first-movie choice surprised me. While my mom was watching some kind of documentary about Michael Palin in the Amazon and I was watching Warm Bodies (the world’s only zomromcom), my serious lawyer father decided he wanted to watch Hotel Transylvania.

Our first stop after arriving in Heathrow was Stonehenge. Watching cars driving on the wrong side made me extremely uncomfortable, and my dad’s driving made me absolutely certain that I was going to die before I get to my study abroad, but we made it.

One of my freshmen gave me the best quotes about traveling, which has become our motto for the trip:

“I’ve always liked sightseeing. It’s like you’re exploring! Except millions of other people already know about it!”

The cool thing about Stonehenge is that despite the fact that millions of people know about it, zero living people know what it was for. There are plenty of theories of where the stones came from and why it was put there (likely as a calendar of sorts), but no one really knows, and we probably never will.

 

I was surprised by the protest signs. There are many petitions to return skeletons being studied to their burial places. This sign particularly caught my eye because the picture choice absolutely didn’t command respect from me:

We next went to Lyme Regis, which is one stop on a 630-mile hiking trail (unsurprisingly, no one else wanted to hike it with me). I noticed a LOT of great signs while we were there.

Beware Using Inflatables.

Hospital for Poorly Bears and Dolls.

Thanks, Moon Moon!

Since the ocean was there, we had to touch it. Immediately when my sister went to the water’s edge, I realized something hilarious was going to happen. And, sure enough…

Don't worry; she didn't actually fall in.

Lyme Regis is very pretty, with lots of old houses and a lovely seafront.

They’ve also got Seussian lampposts, which I couldn’t not take a picture of—and look who I found in England, all the way from darkest Peru.

Tonight we’re in Mousehole (it’s pronounced MAUW-zel), and the story of the Mousehole Cat is here and here, if you’re not familiar with it. (UPDATE: Apparently these links do not work for people in the States! Try googling or youtubing "The Mousehole Cat" for full story.)  Pictures to follow, as we’ll be staying here for a few days but I didn’t have my camera on me before it got dark. Cheerio!