Days 14-17

Home: Stephen’s AirBNB

Our inspection of the bike facilities on the Great Western Railway train that we took to Totnes confirmed that they weren’t great, but with unloaded bikes we should be able to figure something out. So we made a plan to do a day-trip west into Cornwall, to the end of the line at Penzance, where we would then use our bikes to extend the range of our tourism.

Again I’d bought tickets online, selecting a train that had two bike slots available for us to reserve. This time (maybe because of the bikes), we needed to collect physical tickets from a kiosk at the station, which produced a massive stack (for us, the bikes, receipts, etc.) Using elevators to cross beneath the tracks to reach our platform was easy, and then there is good real-time signage to put you in the spot on the platform where your car will stop.

The bicycle storage is almost identical to Amtrak’s Empire Service train that we just took across New York State: a luggage rack space that has been converted to bike storage by adding hooks on the wall that you hang the wheels from. Here instead of one bike per rack/carriage, both of our bikes were to squeeze into one rack (the only one on the train). That has the advantage over Amtrak that we don’t have to get onto separate cars, reducing the chaos somewhat, but the disadvantage of our two bikes having little interest in smoothly interlocking with each other. Like Amtrak, it was required to deflate our tires to squeeze the wheels into the hooks (and even then I scratched my rim a bit); maybe hanging Rett’s bike from the rear wheel would have allowed an easier fit, but that would have required another deflation and more awkward and difficult finagling of the bikes in a small space.

The train arrived and departed efficiently, and since the bike racks are sort of in the “between cars” area, all of our struggling and realigning could be done while in motion, and without disturbing other passengers. So it would have been possible to do with fully-load bikes, stowing some of our bags alongside our bikes, and carrying others to our nearby seats, but still not as easy as it is on Amtrak trains with baggage cars where we can offload some of our load to the baggage handlers.

During our journey, three other guys with bikes got on and off (though maxing at two at a time), obviously without reservations, and so they just hung out in the between-cars area with their bikes (one sliding his into the bit of space at the bottom of our “closet”). This was clearly “normal” for everyone, including the conductor, so while our reservations would probably give us some moral high ground in a space-limited dispute, in practice the culture seems similar to traveling on narrow British roads: it’s a negotiation where everyone works together to achieve the best outcome for everyone.

One of the attractions for me to this far southwestern tip of England was St. Michael’s Mount, a mirror of the more-famous Mont Saint-Michel on the opposite side of the English Channel. A castle-topped cone of rock rising out of the water has been an iconic image to me ever since my group of nerd friends had a formative experience watching the strange physics-philosophy movie Mindwalk in high school.

Unfortunately, the one day that made sense for us to go (largely due to the dry, low-wind weather forecast) is the one day that the island is closed (bizarrely a Saturday, but I think it might be an overtourism defense strategy). So we’d debated whether the trip was worth it at all, but in the end I decided that simply seeing the island rising from the bay might scratch my itch as much as actually being on the island. So we began our looping ride first by going “backwards” along a Channel-edge path for a few miles to the launch-point village of Marazion. Ironically, for the country’s hilliest county, it was the flattest riding we’ve done in England! We got close enough to definitely feel the fairy-tale atmosphere, though also close enough to wish we had been able to climb to the top!

When zooming in on Cornwall, Google Maps showed me a ton of markers for ancient stone circles and standing stones. I don’t know if that’s because they’re genuinely some of the biggest highlights of the county, or because Google knows that I’m married to Rett, and knows that she is super-drawn to such things, but either way, that was our next target. First was a slightly-more-practical but still atmospherically-witchy location, Sancreed Holy Well. The roads taking us there were almost completely car-free, and especially unloaded, it made for quite-pleasurable cycling. When we briefly paused to find the footpath leading to the well, another cyclist riding by stopped to ask if he could help (something that has happened more times in a month in this country than in our previous 5 years combined?) Justin turned out to be a local WarmShowers host, and we had a great chat where he shared some interesting history, and further recommendations in the area. Since he was just on his bike, he didn’t have any ice cream to share with us, but in every other respect it felt very much like the Mobile WarmShowers Experience we had in Eastern Washington a few years ago.

The next stop, on Justin’s recommendation, was Boscawen-Ûn Stone Circle, from an era similar to Stonehenge, though certainly simpler. But that smaller scale meant that there was only one other person there when we completed the walk through the ferns, and after quietly enjoying the atmosphere, she helpfully pointed out that the one stone whose cooling touch she had been feeling was a solid block of quartz.

Next was a more-modern bit of Cornish culture, a lunch stop at St. Buryan Farm Shop for Cornish pasties and cream tea! While the pasty and the empanada are close cousins, the last actual Cornish pasty I had was 22 years ago on a bike tour to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, one endpoint of the Cornish diaspora. Across that much time, I can’t remember if the American translation was better or worse, but both definitely provided good fuel for additional cycling. “Cream tea” was completely new though, and apparently the “cream” has nothing to do with the tea, it just refers to the scones + jam + clotted cream that comes with your tea (and in our case they forgot to bring over the tea anyway, but that was fine, we got the good stuff!)

The furthest stop on our loop was inspired by Rett’s interest in the Minack Theatre, a modern-but-Ancient-Greek-looking tiered amphitheater cut into the cliffs above the English Channel. However, like St. Michael’s Mount, it was closed today (or, at least, there was an evening performance, so access to the theater part of their grounds, the whole point, would be restricted). Still, like at Totnes, I used her inspiration as a jumping-off point, and instead designed a 2-mile loop walk along the same clifftops.

And yes, even without seeing the mix of man-made and natural (something we always enjoy, like at St. Michael’s Mount), the purely natural scenes were amazing and completely-unexpected. For someone who previously believed that the whole of England existed only in black-and-white, this is the last place in the world where I would have expected bright blue “tropical” waters.

On her unloaded bike, Rett had been doing quite well over the Cornish hills, but the steep sunny climb up to the clifftops, and an afternoon swoon had her body suddenly failing her desires again. So I was happy to cut our walk at the halfway point so that we could return to Penzance and our train home without needing to press. Now crossing the deep-carved coastal cliffs, the grades finally increased to the dreaded 14-percenters, and with Rett’s body not responding I still had to take her bike up one of them, but only to save her for the rest of the ride.

Back in Penzance, we didn’t have time for a restaurant dinner before our train, so instead we picked up sandwiches (well, the whole “meal deal”) from a Tesco Express, and then dropped into Men-an-Tol Brewhouse for a couple pints. A true nano-brewery, the family owners were hanging out on the ground floor like it was their living room, so we went upstairs to drink amongst the brewing equipment and ingredients. Perhaps to complete our “closed but still worth it” theme of the day, they normally have a saison and a gose (and as described, very good ones at that!), but they were out. Oh well, what we got was good anyway!

Though we got to our train with plenty of time to spare before departure, we didn’t achieve our goal of getting there before any other cyclists did (we again had reservations and thus would “legally” have priority, but I figured it would still be easiest if we could claim that right before anyone else got themselves wedged in ahead of us). A guy with a mid-sized touring load arrived to the carriage just before we did, but then he was surprised (along with us) to see four bikes already occupying the three bike slots on-board (this was a CrossCountry train, so a slightly-different bike setup than the Great Western Railway). We declared to the group that we were reservation holders, and the tourer immediately and graciously said “fair enough”, backed out, and returned to the station, despite him perhaps being the only one who was trying to get onto this train because the one he booked had been cancelled.

The couple with e-bikes (perhaps not technically allowed?) didn’t seem at all interested in giving up their slots, but the third guy suggested he could un-rack his bike and put it in a large “normal” luggage section, since his might fit there better than ours. But I did a quick rough measure that proved ours would fit there too, so I went ahead and did that. It was still a finagle (my handlebars were rubbing the shelf above, and a post made it difficult to angle them in and out), but compared to the hooks in the “official” slots, it was actually a much-easier and more-protected way to store them! (though the hooks here hung from the ceiling, not the wall, which seems like a somewhat-easier design.) The conductor explicitly gave his approval to our positioning, lending more support to the idea that the culture is to all just work together to accommodate as many bikes as possible, but then that just made me sad that the bike tourer had “given up” so easily, because he probably could have found a way too squeeze on too, but it was too late by that point to run back and get him.