Caravan Travels

12.30pm – Once more we awoke to a damp and foggy start here at Looe Club Campsite. However, I had to pop down the hill into Looe this morning and it’s substantially clearer down there. This seems very much to be the pattern here – foggy up the hills above the coastal towns but clearer at sea-level. (Siri tells me our caravan is about 302 feet above sea-level. However, it can’t explain to me how it knows that!).

We’re still hoping for some sunshine, but we’re fast running out of days on which to enjoy it. So far in the two and a half weeks we’ve been on holiday in Cornwall we’ve only been able to sit out on one day. The forecast has been promising decent weather several times, but it never materialises.

Helen and Jacquie are going off together this afternoon to visit ‘The Story of Emily’ whilst Garry and I are going into Looe to have a ‘boys’ afternoon – with absolutely no dress shops (for once!). What was funny, however, was that as we walked around the shops, Garry and Jacquie’s dog Hettie automatically tried to enter at least two women’s clothes shops, until Garry steered her away. She’s obviously completely conditioned into visiting those shops when Jacquie is present!

4.40pm – So, down in Looe Garry and I visited no less than three different hardware shops. Although by now I have quite a comprehensive toolkit and ‘technical bits’ box for the caravan, I was in need of some washers for a simple repair I needed to do. That’s the sort of ‘mission’ Garry and I quite like – sourcing the required bits to carry out a repair!

After buying more washers than I could ever possibly need, we had Cornish Pasty and chips seated outside a restaurant by the Looe lifeboat station and then had a lengthy chat with a lady RNLI volunteer. Unfortunately, by the time we’d done that it had started to drizzle so we were quite damp by the time we got back to Garry’s car!

10.40pm – The ladies had a very interesting and educational afternoon learning about the life and work of Emily Hobhouse. She was a humanitarian, pacifist and feminist who challenged the Westminster government on its treatment of Boers, especially women and children in Southern Africa in the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. Over dinner at the caravan this evening Helen and Jacquie regaled Garry and me with information about the exhibition which seems to be a very high-tech and immersive experience, well worth taking the time to visit.

As I write this it’s raining outside yet again, but there are high expectations that the weather is finally about to improve. Personally, I’ll believe when I see it for myself!