Travel To Devon

We were up pretty early, like 6 a.m., to finish packing and cleaning. Beautiful sunny day again. Galen and Will watched Zingzillas, a bizarre kids' morning show on the telly, and we were walking out the door just before 8:30, a bright sunny day.

Drove along the now-familiar route through the white buildings of Rottingdean and Saltdean, gulls in the air, and found the Enterpirse car rental place, hidden in a temporary building under the railway viaduct in Brighton. They decided that my indiscretion, the one where I had accidentally rammed a giant flowerpot at our cottage while trying to find out whether the car had a front parking sensor, would cost me £50. Ah well. It was a pretty deep scratch. The guy who drove us to the railway station had moved recently from Poland. He said he'd just been working in Scotland, but that he couldn't understand anything anyone said there. Kate's response: "We have to go there!"

We bought pasties in the station, and Will immediately pounced on the Chicken Tikka Savoury Slice. Kate had coffee! Boarded the 10:19 for London Victoria, The first car we stepped into was just a commuter-type coach and had no luggage racks, and we had three big bags and four knapsacks to stow. We headed into other cars, at Kate's insistence, and found the ideal: a luggage rack and seats right next to them. Settled in for a fast and comfortable ride to Clapham Junction.

There we had to wrestle the bags up and down stairs to another platform, but there was planety of time. Kate bought more pasties, because Will was consuming them as fast as he could lay his hands on them. It's his new love, the chicken pasty. Watched the multi-coloured trains of Southern and Southwest come and go.

The 11:27 to Exter was pretty full, and again not really designed to accommodate people with large bags. We squeezed on board with some trepidation. After searching, Kate and the boys lodged in an air-conditioned car, at the very front of the train, in a set of four seats with a table. Luggage racks throughout the train were full though, so I sat with the two big bags in the cycle storage rack, one car back, for about the first half hour. Then the conductor befriended me, and convinced me that no one was going to run off with our bags. "I've worked 20 years on this railway," he said, "and only seen one bag go missing. And that was because the lady forgot where she put it." But to make matters better, he offered to lock our bags behind a set of sliding doors near the driver's compartment. Another trainman also befriended us and gave us pens branded with "RMT"--which turns out to be the railway workers union. So we had a very comfortable ride to Exeter, about three hours, passing through Salisbury.

At Exeter we did not have to change platforms at all, but the train to Barnstaple was a pitiful affair of two dinky cars that looked like they belonged more in a subway--and it was already full when it pulled in! We rode the whole way standing in the doorwell, squeezed between our bags and other people in a similar situation. When the doors would open we would all shift around to make room, and then create a channel for those getting off. But it was a pretty ride through countryside, up a little river for half and hour, and down another pretty little river that eventually became the River Taw, and led us to Barnstaple. We got off at that little station and smiled, for our train journey was over.

Enterprise sent a taxi to pick us up: a class operation. From our short ride through it, Barnstaple looks like a pretty town with a core of old buildings. We were furnished with a car, but unfortunately it's another Vauxhall Insignia; "free upgrade" is always a bad sign.

We drove out to Appledore and noted that Roads Are Wider In Devon. There are little shoulders, and even gratis lay-by's on the A39, as if road designers thought they would be a good idea AND were able to find land to put them on. Here it's as if there's a littel more land than in Sussex.

Appledore is a village on a hillside. At first glance, all the houses are painted white or pastels: pink, yellow, grey, blue. But when you look more closely, each has also a "waterline" along the bottom, as on a boat, where a dark colour has been painted from the pavement of the street up about 30 cm. They might use a deep blue for a pastel blue house, or deep orange for a pale yellow house. The colour is usually repeated in the trim of the door and windows. On streets that go steeply uphill, the waterline is actually a triangle, thick at the downhill end, thin at the uphill end, so as you look up the street the housefronts appear to be set on a series of triangles rising like steps.

We're in a white home, with black waterline and trim, just one segment of a long row of connected houses on "New Street," which is a narrow alleyway that curves up across a hill over the harbour. Our parking is off a nameless alley, about 30' higher in elevation, that parallels New Street. So when we say we have to descend down our garden to get to the back door, we're going down about two floors! Our parking space is tiny, and our car has already acquired the nickname of The Whale.

The cottage is a cute two-storey place where Galen and Will have a small whitewashed bedroom right next to our small whitewashed bedroom. Our window looks out front and their looks out the back into the garden. There is one great window in our bedroom through which you can see out over the roofs of town, and across the estuary to Instow, the village on the far side.

We walked down into Appledore and discovered that "The Quay" is the street along the waterfront, that there is no water there at low tide, because on this estuary (the Torridge River estuary) at low tide there are extensive mud flats and not much water. We found that all other streets of Appledore are tiny and steep, and that there are little shops along the one called Market Street. We ate dinner in the yard of the Shipgate Hotel, a pub on the Quay, and perused "Johns of Appledore," the general store and post office, open to 9:00, the place where you can get all sorts of groceries and what-have-you. We observed a massive queue at Sylvester's Fish & Chips, so it's either pretty special or well-marketed.

We also found the Appledore Visual Arts Festival will be going on here for two more days. ("4 days, 70 + events, one small riverside village, one big festival") There are films screenings, talks, walks and gallery shows, musicians in the streets, and basically the town is looking its best for this. There is a Best Dressed Doorknocker competition.