Minehead – in the laundrette

Happy birthday Cindy.

 

Too pooped to blog last night, so this is a good time (9:30am Saturday)  while we are waiting for the clothes to wash.

 

 

 

We went to Clovelly yesterday morning, very touristy as you’d expect, with its single, steep windy main street. No cars are allowed, so the locals all have sledges that they drag their shopping and other stuff over the cobblestones on. The residents would have to be amongst the fittest with all the up hill walking they have to do. The village is privately owned and has had only 2 family owners for about 600? 800? years. Apparently it is built on the site of an earlier Saxon village. There is no doubt that it is a very pretty village with a lot of attention paid to the small gardens with lots of colour. Took us 30-40 minutes to walk slowly back up the hill. A few years ago, you could ride back up on a donkey, but this has  been replaced with a Landrover. There is obviously a back road for a limited number of vehicles. Even  building this road would have been a big effort with the slope and valley constrictions.

 

 

 

The Cliff Railway, a Victorian water powered lift  at Lynton  was next on the list, but we got caught behind a very large, slow crane, on a narrow windy road with no options to pass, so fortunately we passed a National Trust property, Arlington, and went in to have a look, allowing the crane to get off our road.

 

Arlington is a gem of a house, Victorian and beautifully furnished. Lots of fireplaces, timber, big carpet mats and generally very warm & luxurious. It’s a house (manor house) that would be very comfortable to live in compared to many of the older buildings we’ve seen.

 

 

 

 

Back on the road again and on to the Cliff Railway. What a great bit if engineering. There are 2 tracks down (up?) a steep cliff with a carriage on each one, cables and pulleys, so that when one car goes down, the other comes up, like many other cable cars. This one doesn’t need any motors, it is powered purely by water that fills the upper car so that it is heavier than the bottom car and therefore pulls the bottom car up as the top one descends.

On to Minehead for the night and here we are back waiting for the wash to finish.

Back again, it’s Saturday night. Dinner at local pub again. Never seen a plate with so many potatoes on it. Very tasty chicken, mushroom & leek pie.

 

 

Visited Dunster this morning. Beautiful medieval village with an old castle and an  octagonal yarn market built in the late 1500s.

 

 

 

We’re now running out of time, so we drove straight (well a big loop) from Dunster to Tenby, Wales on the motorway, about 180 miles and 3.5 hours. 

Rydym yn stopio mewn pentref cyn Dinbych y Pysgod am seibiant a dod o hyd y coffi gorau hyd yn hyn. Roedd ergyd ddwbl yn safonol - roedd yn rhaid i ofyn a ydych eisiau un ergyd. Gyrru i mewn i ganol y tagfeydd, stryd gul (sut ydych chi'n defnyddio stryd gul fel ansoddair -? Streeted cul) dref Dinbych y Pysgod yn chwilio am barcio a rhywle ar gyfer y noson. Wedi dod o hyd maes parcio aml-stori (gyda Sainsburys sefyll y tu allan a phrynu potel o Lambrusco ar gyfer ein ddiod cyn cinio Methu dod o hyd i wely a brecwast gyda swydd wag, felly gyrrodd allan o'r dref ac yn dod o hyd i B & B ychydig filltiroedd allan yn y pentref nesaf. - yn edrych dros gaeau gwyrdd i'r môr yn y pellter, heddychlon iawn.

We stopped in a village before Tenby for a break & found the best coffee so far. A double shot was standard – had to ask if you wanted a single shot. Drove into the centre of the congested, narrow street (how do you use narrow street as an adjective – narrow streeted?) town of Tenby looking for parking and somewhere for the night. Found a multi story carpark (with Sainsburys beside it & bought a bottle of Lambrusco for our pre dinner drink). Couldn’t find a B&B with a vacancy, so drove out of town and found a B&B a few miles out in the next village – looks over green fields to the sea in the distance, very peaceful.