UK road trip, Cornwall

Daylight, in Santa Fe, used to host a weekly, open Friday lunch. I was a regular and so was Dick Cramer of Tripos. He would occasionally mention a branch of Tripos in Cornwall, far from anywhere. That made me curious. At the pre-UK-QSAR dinner I asked about it and was told it's in Bude. In looking at the map I saw a point called "Land's End." I decided then to go to Cornwall and see those two places. I did want to see a third; Neal Stephenson's Wire amazingly good article some years back on next-gen transoceanic cable mentioned a place on Great Britain where for 100+ years the transatlantic cables have come ashore. He said there were only a few places on the western shoreline where that could happen. I wanted to see it, but I did not know where it was.

Driving about the UK is slow. The fastest routes are the motorways (M25, M10, etc). The GPS mapper in the car said to head north towards the London Orbital and take the motorway across. I declined. I wanted to take the local roads. It's pretty good going if you can manage 40 on those, making for a long trip. Then again, it's pretty good during rush hour if you can get to 40 on the Orbital.

Because of the traffic, curvy roads, close walls and trees, UK driving is pretty tense compared to cross-country US driving. They've a high population density and it's pretty uniform, meaning that even in the countryside it's a lot of small towns instead of a few big ones. The biggest exception so far was west Scotland, and to a lesser extent in Cornwall.

I drove and drove and drove and drove. I finally got to Land's End at around midnight. I wasn't sure what was there. Was it some place I could say "I've been here" and go? For example, I visited Hoover Dam at midnight. Parked the car (much easier at night), walked to the dam, looked out on the water, and that was good enough. I didn't want the dam tour nor see any museum about the making of the dam. Was Land's End the same?

I got there. It was dark. Dark enough to see some of the dust bands in the Milky Way . The skies for much of my visit were clear. I could even see a bit of the haze of the Milky Way from Oxford. I saw the lighthouses off the Cornwall coast and I could hear the surf in the distance. I started down the trail, thinking it wasn't so far. I quickly realized I was quite a ways above the sea and it was too dark to see much.

I came back in the early, early morning. Land's End itself is a small theme park. If it was open I could have bought food, seen some history, including that of ships and wrecks, and watched a sped-up movie of the trip from Land's End to John o' Groats. Those are the traditional ends of Great Britian. But I was there at sunrise, and solely to see the end of the land.

I took that trail again. Very quickly I reached the end. The coastline is an eroding granite cliff. Someday I should learn more geology — geology of Cornwall. A quite impressive place, though no whales as there were near Cape Town. Though Wales was just a ways north.

After ooh-ing and ahh-ing a bit, I drove into Penzance [pictures]. Yes, where the pirates were from. That is, the soccerfootball team. At the time of Gilbert and Sullivan it was, and still is, a quiet seaside town. Population about 30,000. I parked near the Jubilee Pool. It's called a "lido", which is a UK term for a public swimming area. Now I understand why the lido deck on the Love Boat was named that. This one is from the art deco era. It's a salt water pool filled by the sea at high tide, which is when I was there. In my various readings now the marina is dry at low tide, which wasn't the case when I was there.

I stopped for a quick breakfast snack and asked the woman behind the counter where I should go. Following her directions I walked around the main shopping area and stopped at the statue of Humphry Davy, Penzance's best known citizen.

From there I drove to Bude. Coming into town I saw a great beach so stopped at Widemouth Bay. Wide sandy beach near low tide. Mild waves. There was a surfing class going on. While the water was cold enough that they wore wet suits it wasn't cold enough to walk barefooted. I chatted a bit with a woman who was getting ready to go surfing. She was an avid beginner. I mentioned I was there because of Tripos. She knew several people who had worked there. "Had" because Tripos (as I knew) had a layoff because that facility was a big money loser.

I parked at the tourist center near the harbor. "Harbor" is the misnomer. It's a cove protected by a breakwater. The tides on the Atlantic side are very impressive, though perhaps magnified by the shallow slope of the beaches. Like in Penzance boats could float in the harbor at high tide, including old-style sailing ships, but be beached at low tide, with a decent walk to the shoreline. It has an interesting piece of Victorian era engineering. The harbor proper is a sea lock, which like the Jubilee Pool is filled during high tide. That's when ships can come in and out. They close the locks (by hand, by the way) and the sea drops away at least 10 feet. The canal was meant to bring the local lime-rich sand as fertilizer in to the farmlands and ship out local crops. The canal boats had wheels because there was one section which was too steep for locks. They put the boat onto rails, pulled it up (or let it down) and took it to the continuation of the canal. Technology. Amazing, ain't it?

I learned this by visiting the historical museum next to the canal. It had the standard set of pictures, models, memorablia that you find in this sort of small town museum. (Compare to the Hamburg museum which was huge and gave more of a historical perspective and interpretation than being a collection.) Of interest to me was a picture of the HMS Bude in dazzle camouflage. I read about that last year so it was neat to look at the picture and say "a-ha, I know why it's painted that way. Education. Amazing, isn't it?

I had a Cornish Pasty in Bude. I like South African pies a lot better. The pasty was tough and bland. Hearty is another way to say it. I first had a pasty visiting EBI some years ago and learned pasties were meant for Cornish miners to eat while deep in the mines. Hearty and able to last the trip, which a ZA one couldn't do. Wikipedia quotes "It is said that a good pasty should be strong enough to endure being dropped down a mine shaft." The EBI pasties had small dough handles on the side. A guy in line at the cafeteria said that's because deep in the mines, covered in dust, the miners would hold the pasty by the handles, eat the rest of the pasty, and throw away the contaminated dough part.

Bill Bryson, in his "The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America", which I read on Rhoda's hide-a-bed in 1992. He's an American who had lived in the UK for a long time and was taking a tour through the US. He went through the UP ("Upper Peninsula of Michigan") and was surprised to see pasties for sale there. It was at the end of the season but there was one place still open. He bought one and said it tasted exactly like a pasty should, and very un-American, meaning there wasn't enough butter/grease for US tastes. The woman selling him the pasty was happy to be told it was very authentic. He had picked up a British accent and she thought he was British.

Later in his tour Bryson visited Santa Fe. I didn't notice that in my first read. It wasn't until later when I reread the book, and well after I moved to Santa Fe, that I noticed it. He liked Santa Fe based purely on going downtown, buying a margarita at the Ore House overlooking the Plaza, and meeting his .. niece? second cousin? .. who was attending St. Johns. Not much to go on to judge a town, but then it's about what I've been doing for most of my road trips, and I've done nowhere near the background research he's done.

Leaving Bude I headed for Oxford. I had seen Cheddar on the map and I knew (because I read "Salt: A World History") that Cheddar cheese originated from the caves of the nearby Cheddar Gorge. I had hoped to visit, and it wasn't far off my path. But I was also hoping to make it to Oxford by 6:30pm or so. I decided to go anyway, even knowing I wouldn't get to Cheddar until 4:45 or so, which wouldn't give me enough time to visit the gorge or any historical institutions. It would give me enough time to say I've been to Cheddar. So I did and now I can. I bought cheese too, from The Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company, which is "the only Cheddar made in Cheddar." Call me a sucker - I went there. They had various samples available. I ended up buying a medium cheddar (I usually go for sharp but didn't like their mature well enough), a smoked (my favorite of the bunch) and an English Stilton, which is a blue cheese.

All tasty. We (I, B and Carole) feasted on cheese for a late dessert that night. It was a good thing I decided to take the detour as there was no way I would have been on time to Oxford. The motorway was backed up for some miles and after an hour I finally made it to an exit where I could take the back roads into town. It's the sort of thing were having a GPS guidance system should be helpful. It was, kind of. It knew there was stopped traffic and offered to do an alternate route. But the alternate route would be the same as the alternate for everyone going to London and looking for an alternate. I couldn't tell it to choose a different alternate. Once I started on the right road it gave up on trying to route me the other way and became helpful again.

I've heard stories about people obeying the GPS more than their own senses, like ending up along a route little more than a cow path on the edge of a cliff. That didn't happen to me. The closest was saying that a road went through to the Oxford ring road and when I tried it out found that it dead ended at a relatively recent fence. It was help for a few places where I decided "I think I'll see what's that way" or took the wrong exist, and it could take me back to where I wanted to go.