Thursday, 21 February 2008

An Early Start 26.05.07


The demands of GCSE and A Level exams have restricted our holiday in Cornwall to one week this year, so I was determined that we should make the most of our time. I have never enjoyed the ‘pleasures’ of a packed motorway and Bristol is always a black spot as it seem to be the cone storage capital of UK. I decided that we would get everything ready on the Friday, go to bed early and then set off at 2am on Saturday morning.

Everything went more or less according to plan apart from a bit of procrastinating from Robbie in the morning. Believe it or not he had to ring control to check on the progress of his ‘empties’ at 2am! He wanted us to leave a bit later as he calculated that we would then have a chance of seeing one of his trains as we went along the motorway. He got his wish, as we didn’t set out until 3.15 am and I did indeed see a train as we travelled down the motorway, but Robbie (who intended to stay awake to keep an eye on me) was ‘Z’ing by the time we passed Oxford and he dozed all the way to Cornwall, so he missed it. He said it was the wrong train anyway. I also saw a fox cross the whole motorway, but everyone else was asleep and missed it. We had an excellent journey; we arrived at Padstow just after 8am having made one comfort stop on the way. That gave us plenty of time to explore all the shops and to enjoy brunch at one of our favourite restaurants.

Robbie and I headed for the little bookshop that we love, he was very restrained and only bought one book, but I bought two, A Pictorial Survey of Great Western Branch Lines and A Portrait of the Atlantic Coast Express. I was dragged away by Laura and Emily; they had been checking out the designer shops and wanted to ‘show me’ what they had found. They jointly purchased an Animal handbag which they intend to share, but both have their eyes on other clothing as well. Maybe we should have stayed at home! Sam bought a decision dice and a gruesome pen that defies description, but he has his sights on greater things too!

We got to the caravan by mid afternoon, it has been upgraded since last year and it is absolutely beautiful. By the time we were all installed and tidied up and the shopping had been fetched and packed away, I was exhausted. I went bed before Dr Who, leaving the ‘boys’ to enjoy the flat screen LCD TV.

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