We arise to a misty fog. Amy has not run in 4 weeks
and is happy to exercise her right to exercise. I sleep in. Shortly after she leaves,
I feel guilty and get up to shower and get dressed. I descend to the lobby to
read while waiting for her to return.
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| View at Breakfast in Penzance |
She returns after running about 2.5 miles. Together,
we enter the restaurant and enjoy a sumptuous English buffet breakfast. Lots of
meat, scrambled eggs, baked tomatoes and mushrooms. Yummy, and of course we eat
too much. After breakfast, we return to our room and Amy showers and gets ready
for today’s destination, St. Ives.
There is a train at 10:00, but we don’t think we can
make, so just take our time both at breakfast and as we walk to the train
station. We must walk faster than we think, or have lost track of time, because
as we approach the station, the train is there and it is only 9:55. We buy our
tickets with cash, board the train and within 2 minutes are headed back to St.
Erth, where we transfer to the local to St. Ives. I don’t know why, but I
chuckle at the fact that we didn’t try to make the train and we still managed
to be on time.
The neck of the Cornwall peninsula is only 5 miles
wide here, so by the time we get to St. Erth, where we transfer to a dedicated
St. Ives train, we are almost to the north side of the Cornwall peninsula. The St. Ives train
starts a couple of minutes after we board and in less than 30 minutes total, we
disembark and walk into St. Ives.
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| St. Ives Inner Harbor |
This is a quaint and ancient tourist town. We walk
all around, starting with the pedestrian path above …
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| Porthminster Beach |
… to the east of the harbor, going through the Harbor
and Market areas, passing the coast guard station and walking past …
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| Porthmeor Beach. |
Here we come across the fabled Tate St. Ives, a museum
of Modern Art and Modern Art History. It may seem odd that the Tate has a
branch here, but it stems from this area’s St. Ives school of art (an ad hoc
community of artists from the 70’s) and a wealth of Cornish artists works being
in the Tate collection. The museum opened in 1993 and has been going strong
ever since.
We enter and spend an interesting hour wandering the
dozen or so exhibition rooms. After the Tate, we head back towards the center of town and
stop in at the Barbara Hepworth sculpture gallery, adding to our enjoyment of
the town. She created many interesting sculptures on display here.
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| A Hepworth Sculpture |
We are getting hungry, so we leave the Hepworth Studio
and head down the hill into town, stopping at the Lifeboat Restaurant for
lunch. Amy has a steak and gem ale pie and I have Cod & Chips. There is too
much food, but it is all tasty. We stagger out the door and head back toward
the train station.
We take the low road, figuring we will miss the next
train, so we don’t hurry. That’s OK with us, as some sitting time will help us
recover from all the walking we have done today. Just as we turn the corner and
view the station, we see the train heading in. We hurry to board and make the
train without having to wait at all. Today the gods of transportation are smiling on
us! We get off at St. Erth and have a 15 minute wait for the train from Paddington
into Penzance (the same train we took yesterday).
We debark at Penzance Station and walk across the
courtyard to the EuropCar where we pick up our wheels for the next 8 days, a VW
Polo. We ride back to the hotel, grateful that the roads are a bit wider than I
remember the roads in Ireland being 6 years ago. I keep telling my self “drive
on the left side” and no major mishaps occur.
We relax for the rest of the afternoon. For dinner, I
want to go to the Admiral Benbow Inn, perhaps the most famous restaurant in the
world of fiction. It is here that Jim Hawkins meets Billy Bones and begins his
adventure to Treasure Island. The story is fiction, but Robert Louis Stevenson
knew of this Inn and set the first part of the story in it. Amy tolerates my
desire.
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| Admiral Benbow Inn |
The interior décor is charming, all kinds of nautical
items. I have Rum and the Fish Pie while Amy has Fish and Chips. The food is tasty!
We enjoy the historic atmosphere and return to our hotel stuffed. Another
really good day in the UK.
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