Day 51 – Plymouth to Bigbury

 

Date: Thursday 16^th September 2010   Distance: 31.5 Miles

 

After a drive down and good night at Premier Inn, Plymouth, we had a lovely breakfast. Unfortunately there was a mishap- floods of orange juice over and under the table from the dispenser when the lever got stuck. We could only see glasses of orange on our table, which was worse! Hope it wasn’t us!

Disaster no 2 came when we took our hire car to Enterprise. On picking up one of the panniers and then resting it on the seat I discovered a squashed, full yoghurt all over the floor and then a mess on the seat too from the bag’s bottom. Although I tried to clear it up I made yoghurt trails all over the place.  Nobody else seemed bothered!

The next thing was we looked for the bike-capes, as the sky looked like rain was imminent. No capes to be seen. We had an abortive attempt at finding a bike shop but gave up, finding it too difficult and that was with a sat nav.

 

It was a grey start but warm enough to not need a coat. Or could it have been the hills? Bob said we’d climbed 3,000 feet by the end of the day.

After 9 miles it still felt like we had hardly left the city suburbs. There was a bit of shared coastal path near Plympton where there was quite a lot of industry- gas, offal- all sorts of smelly stuff.

 

At Newton Ferrars, a characterful place, we stopped by the estuary having a Firsty Ferret and a Badger beer outside the Dolphin Inn. We couldn’t see any open sea but the view was pretty and there was a bit of sun. Bob had a doorstep granary sandwich and I had lovely carrot soup with my own doorstep.

In order the get round the river estuary and on with our journey we had to walk a short footpath. Then we were surprised at how many times we had to get out of the way of cars( really large ones too) down these narrow lanes.

 

Either side of the road there were fields with around 50 pheasants that scuttled to hide in the sweet corn (probably the attraction) or hedges as we rode past. We did another bit of Coastal path from Charlebury and then arrived at Bigbury on Sea at  4-30.

 

There were people surfing. A narrow causeway looked like a biblical parting of the waves leading to a small Island, Burgh. It would have been nice to go across and see the famous hotel of Agatha Christie repute though it stood out white, impressive and typical of the roaring 20s and 30s. We would have a liked a ride in the funny sea tractors but they weren’t running.

 

I saw one building only with solar panels despite ideal sunny positions. We noticed that the farmers were able to supplement their income by using their fields for extra car parking- £3 a day and labelled as Economy Parking being a fair way from the sea too.

By evening the sun was glorious and we stayed at The Royal Oak 2 miles up the hill.

Evening meal was good and we enjoyed a drink or two of Doombar.