Thursday 24 March

54F Sunny

After a good nights rest and a hearty English breakfast we started off for St Austell in Cornwall at around 9am to have a look at the Eden Project. Aaargh.....more tiny lanes, slow speeds, round abouts!!! Arrived at around 10am and had to park at what seemed like a mile away. They do supply busses to take you back and forth to your car but we decided to make the walk after driving. A guy called Tim Smit turned a huge disused china clay quarry into a living theatre of plants and people. The result is a series of incredible geodesic biomes, the largest greenhouses in the world, in which different enviroments have been created - rainforest, temperate and arid, all surrounded by gardens. For me, except for the huge biomes, it was pretty underwhelming....it was just a lot of plants. Even Mum was disappointed and that's saying something. The biome which held the rainforest was so steamy l only lasted about 15 mins and headed back out to wait for Mum. We had lunch around 12ish of sweet potato and rosemary soup with a chunk of bread and a drink for 5 pound each. then we made our way back to the car. It was a hard walk back as it was all up hill but we got there. Our next stop was Ipplepen where Mum has a cousin twice removed called Mary. We arrived there around 3.30pm and she gave us a lovely welcome. She lives in a wonderful 3 storey, narrow cottage sitting right on the edge of the road. We ended up staying there for 3 nights as l had a cold and stayed in bed all day on Tuesday. On Wednesday l was feeling a little better so we went to the post office to post our winter clothes and other bits and pieces back home and then just rested up for the remainder of the day. At least Mum was able to catch up with Mary on more family history. Mary said we were very lucky with the weather as March is normally really, really windy and so far the weather has been pretty nice. Today after a light breakfast we got on our way at 10am. Mary had to drive into the next village so she said she would guide us to the M5. She took us through lots of narrow, winding lanes and at one point we had to pass a truck. Man that was nerve racking. I moved too far to the left and hit a big rock so had to back up a bit then slowly, slowly inch past the truck. Finally got past and looked ahead and there's Mary, happy as larry tootling along as if it was nothing and it probably isn't to her. Anyway, we got to the M5 without anymore mishaps. It's good to be on a road where there's 3 lanes and the average speed is about 125k's. We stopped for 40 minutes at what they call "Services" where we had lunch. I got a cheeseburger, drink and chips from Burger King at a cost of 5 pound 20p. We arrived at Heathrow at around 2.30pm and wanted to stay at a hotel on the other side of the road but didn't know how to get to it so we stopped at the service station as we had to fill up anyway and asked the servo who gave us directions. On our way again happily following the directions but somehow we missed something and ended up going back the way we'd come. So we just kept going till we hit a roundabout (we knew ther'd be one), went round it and came back again. This time we thought we'd stop at the car hire place to ask but we missed that turn off 'cause you couldn't make a left hand turn. Frig!!!! So we followed the servo guy's instructions again and this time we made it with Mum's good navigational skills, a little bit of luck and a lot of illegal driving....hehehe. It's been good to catch up on the blog as Mary doesn't have a computer therefore no internet. It's great hearing from all you guys too. Tomorrow it's off to sunny Spain!