Day 55 – Beer to Bridport

 

 Date: Thursday 21^st October 2010   Distance: Miles 19.36

 

Wednesday: Arrived at Taunton, Premier Inn, ready for bed. It was cold, already minus 1 outside and our radiator wasn’t working. Unfazed girl on desk lent us a heater and we both slept well.

 

Thursday: Woke to hard frost but the sky was beautifully blue. Breakfast wasn’t to the usual premier inn standard being not freshly cooked but standing around for self-service. The building, the next door pub was uninviting in that it was cold. We didn’t linger and were off for just after 8 am after scraping the ice off the car!

Lovely spectacle of hot air balloon taking off as we left the area and it followed us for a while on route to Beer. We found a spot to park (limited parking places here -we remembered from last time) on the road near the quarry. It was nice to be able to leave some of our luggage in the car and we set off walking up a one way street (the wrong way) that had 1 arrow. Despite a cold start, the sun was hot and my 4 layers soon became just 2.

 

Our first stop was at Seaton where we went round a roundabout that was decorated with painted old bikes. The river Axe estuary road was out of the sun and chilling us to the bone so we followed the Coastal Path which at this point was a bridleway. We went up and across a little golf course that had wonderful views of the sea.

 

At Lyme Regis we had a cup of tea and coffee on the sea-front in the sun. There were many fossil shops here as this is at the heart of the Jurassic coast and later at Charmouth there were many, too many, people hunting for their own fossils on the beach. The small museum here would have had dinosaur bones for us to see but that section of the museum was being used for a meeting.

 

There was lots of walking up hill, deviating from busy road to a bridlepath to Morecombe Lake. Quite a few cars went by for the lovely viewpoint on the top. The route downhill was peppered with muddy pipeworks- holes and sludge. We had to manoeuvre the barriers round one hole to squeeze by, teetering on the edge of a big pit. It was rough terrain. Rode the last uphill with more ease than we expected and then a fast downhill into Bridport. We realised we had lost our mirror from the handlebars.

 

Quite a busy town, we locked the bike under the Town Hall in the cycle park (space for only a couple more) and had a quick cheese toastie in a deli near the bus stop. Then it was just over an hour back to Beer on the top deck of the bus, to collect the car, seeing some of our journey all over again from a different angle.

 

It was odd arriving at the B and B in a car with the tandem packed inside.

 We walked to West Bay ( about a mile) witnessing a gorgeous sunset over the Sea. We didn’t fancy eating at the Rob Stein famous fish restaurant and we went very low key to a free house The Quartermasters which is part of another Band B, Durbeyfield House. We had a room to ourselves with fire, our choice of CD and very nice home-cooking with lashings of sprouts! The locals drank here and were friendly.

We walked back to a full moon.