Not a Cheap Date
A few years back, we were watching a TV series called "Devon and Cornwall", and the title was not misleading. That is indeed what it was about. Now some episodes included a segment on the Scilly Isles, and we thought it looked like a place we should visit. Neither of us had ever been there before, although Amanda's parents did visit many years ago.
So in early 2023, we had just come back from our Chile trip and were now in the middle of sorting out Amanda's mother's estate. We had already booked our next rather shorter-haul trip, cycling in the hills around Girona in Spain in May, but we like to go somewhere for both our birthdays and that meant planning for September.
We thought: nothing fancy, a UK staycation perhaps... and the Scilly Isles perhaps offered a kind of symmetry under the circumstances.
So we started researching...
Well, we thought we'd probably like a little self-catering cottage, but most of the holiday accommodation is on the largest island, St Mary's, and we started to get a bit disillusioned. It all looked a bit 1950s suburban rather than the romantic island retreat we had envisaged.
But then we broadened our search a bit and found just what we were looking for: Tresco. Loads of beautiful places, lovely looking environment, ah... It's privately owned and the prices are, err, a bit higher. Ok, quite a lot higher. But it's what we wanted. Oh, sod it, what's money, eh?
Ok, booked, now how do we actually get there?
So there's a ferry from Penzance that takes the best part of three hours to St Mary's, then we take another small boat to Tresco. This is not an attractive notion for the world's worst sailor. Ok, there are plane options from Land's End (or Exeter if you don't want to drive that far), but then we discover there's a helicopter from Penance direct to Trescco, it's much quicker than any of the alternatives and you get more baggage allowance than the fixed-wing planes!
Sold! (At a price...)
Now, Penzance isn't quite Land's End, but it's still a fair old way, and while we suppose we could just drive down in a day, the point of a holiday is to relax and have a nice time, isn't it? So we'll spend a couple of days travelling each way, stopping at interesting places on the way.
Well, I say "a couple", but then Amanda discovers that parkrun at the Eden Project gives you free admission and we'd really be interested in spending a day there; we originally visited a year or so after it opened in 2001 and we'd love to see what's happened since then. And you can hire an Airstream caravan to stay there too. Please, just take our money!
So here we are: our cheap UK staycation has undergone what the military call "mission creep". But like I said, we've a lot on our plate with Amanda's mother's estate, so we think we deserve it.
So the year passes. We have fun in the (not) sun of Girona as previously mentioned, but September is now on the horizon and we've not been asked to pay our final balance for Tresco. Why is that? What's going on?
Ah. You know I kind of implied we were under a bit of stress in our lives? Well we've only gone and booked Tresco for 2024, not 2023 at all!
Oh bugger (to use the formal term).
How Amanda and I both failed to notice the clearly written year on the various forms and emails is a mystery, but we are where we are. We've got time booked out from work, hotel reservations on the way there and back, helicopter flights: literally everything except the island itself. We need a Plan B and fast!
Now I don't like to boast [omnes: "Oh Yes You Do"] but we're good at adapting to circumstances and in almost no time we've rescheduled our hotels and flights and found an entirely new island to visit via an airport we've fallen in love with the idea of travelling to or from! The Isle of Man: and that tale is told here.
So jump over our Poland trip and here we are in Autum 2024 and it's finally going to happen. We know this because earlier this year we did indeed receive the request to pay our balance, (Along with a link that lets us pre-order groceries for delivery to our cottage ready for our arrival. Guess what, not Lidl prices.)
Oh, yes, another minor escalation: we've decided to spend a night in Weston-Super-Mare on the way back so we can visit the Helicopter Museum. This is partly a birthday treat for me, but it would be wrong to infer that Amanda is just going along out of a sense of duty. She's not quite the techie nerd like wot I am, but she's far from blind to the aesthetic qualities of elegant engineering.
Phew! I think we need a holiday...
Oh yes, when I say we've never been to the Scilly Isles, that does need to be qualified slightly. This is a two minute walk from our house.
Local legend - backed up by Wikipedia so it must be true! - is that "Scilly" was originally "Silly", so named because when it was built in the 1930s it was considered a silly design. The passage of nearly a century has not rendered it any more sensible! It's too easy for people to genuinely think they are in the right hand lane of two that feed onto a dual carriageway, while others think that they are proceeding in a straight line and these idiots on the right are cutting them up to turn left. Minor shunts and near misses are far from uncommon. It is completely beyond me why it's never been rebuilt as a conventional roundabout, but doubtless there are reasons. Not good reasons, maybe but reasons.
We will be traversing these Scilly Isles on our way to the other ones.
So now at last to the holiday itself, no more digressions, I promise. (Ish.)
Day 1 ~ Monday 2 September ~ Home to Exmouth via Wilton
Day 2 ~ Tuesday 3 September ~ Exmouth to Helston
Day 3 ~ Wednesday 4 September ~ Penzance to Tresco
Day 4 ~ Thursday 5 September ~ Tresco
Day 5 ~ Friday 6 September ~ Tresco
Day 6 ~ Saturday 7 September ~ Tresco
Day 7 ~ Sunday 8 September ~ Tresco
Day 8 ~ Monday 9 September ~ Tresco
Day 9 ~ Tuesday 10 September ~ Tresco
Day 10 ~ Wednesday 11 September ~ Tresco to Trengilly
Day 11 ~ Thursday 12 September ~ Trengilly to St Blazey
Day 12 ~ Friday 13 September ~ St Blazey
Day 13 ~ Saturday 14 September ~ St Blazey to Weston-Super-Mare
Day 14 ~ Sunday 15 September ~ Weston-super-Mare and Home
year index