South West Holidays

An Easter week tradition of exploration is starting to develop in our household. This year we decided to head to the South West of England for a holiday featuring three of our favourite things: Birds, Bipedalism and Beer.

The holiday started at home for Easter weekend. We spent Friday getting the house clean and tidy, then headed to the market for our weekend shopping. Saturday was a trip to the outdoor store for some last minute gearing up then to the rubber duck race, a local charity event.

Next, off to crawl Chapel Street. We are members of the Campaign for Real Ale, and our local CAMRA chapter was holding a pub crawl hitting several pubs in Salford, just outside of Manchester. We had several nice ales and met some fun people and somehow even made it home okay.

Easter started with homemade hot cross buns - proper brunch as they weren't ready until after noon with all the dough rising. After digesting, it was time to start dinner. Slim treated us with a beautiful dinner of duck confit.

Monday it was finally time to head south. First a lovely train ride where a heated game of Scrabble ended in a draw - how often does that happen?! The ride also featured lovely views of Welsh mountains and cute, fuzzy baby lambs. We got into Exeter after 1, so the first order of business was lunch. Well actually the first order was finding our B&B and dropping bags. The Bendene was easy to find and quite nice, on a quiet street of terraced houses. Our room was decent size with a very large bathroom and four-poster bed.

Okay, now lunch. We searched about the city until we finally found the best kept secret in Exeter - the Fat Pig. Better than it sounds - a flavourful mushroom soup, lovely scampi and duck wrapped prosciutto and delicious real ales to drink.

Next off to the Cathedral. We hadn't really researched Exeter much as we were only there for an afternoon so we were delightfully surprised by the Cathedral. It is amazing with the longest unbroken Gothic ceiling in the world - yes, I said the world!

The ceiling is just the beginning. There are fabulous stained glass windows, cool mirrored carts so you can look more closely at the bosses on the ceiling (I'll explain in a minute), and an astronomical clock. This clock is thought to be the origin of 'Hickory Dickory Dock...' The inner workings of this clock were greased with pig fat, attracting mice. So, the bishop's cat was called in and given access with a special door hole. Bosses: the 'spines' of the ceiling are held in place by these. They weigh over a ton and are individually carved and painted. This is a life-sized replica.

We decided that we had better get a start on our walking holiday - we headed down the canal to the Double Locks pub. Highlight of the walk was overhearing a boy on a bike say (remember, he has an adorable little BBC accent): 'That man was mean. I said hello but he only smiled instead of saying hello.' Pub was very cute and perfectly situated for a sunny pint overlooking a double lock on the canal. It is also dog friendly which I thought was very cool until I saw one of said dogs pee in the corner.

Dinner was at the Old Fire House - beautiful, three-story, 16th century, bare stone walls, exposed rafters, all lit with candles. Very cool. I had a delicious stew topped with not interesting pastry, was actually supposed to be a savoury pie. Slim had a fantastic burger. After dinner was an evening walk about the city checking out some of the other ancient churches. My favourite was the oldest, St Pancras, smack in the middle of a shopping center. Too dark for photo of the church, so interpretive sign had to do. Then back for a good sleep.

Tuesday morning started with tasty omelets. Slim ate an omelet! And liked it! (After requesting it be 'well done' of course). We then headed into town to take a peak at the 11th century castle gate and get some photos of the lovely half-timbered city centre shops. Next, time to pick up the car so we could head into wilds.

First stop, the estuary just outside of town for some bird spotting. Our first stop was a bit of a bust, but second stop yielded godwits, shoveler, teal and a few other winter visitors. We then headed over to the other side of the estuary hoping for an osprey - no dice.

Since it was now afternoon and we were still just out of Exeter, we thought we better get a move on. Next stop: Beer, as in the town of. It's a real town! The name actually comes from an old English word for 'woods' (bere). Beer is a very cute, but not too cute, coast town. We chose the Barrel of Beer for lunch and settled in for a feast from the sea, starting with a plate of oysters. Next crab for Slim and fish cake for me and a long wait for me. After what seemed like hours, Slim was finally done picking every morsel from the crab so we took a quick tour of Beer and were off for one more stop on the south Devon coast before heading up to Somerset.

We had one more stop we wanted to make before finding our B&B for the evening. We had read about the Cerne giant - a bawdy, hill-side carving of a well-endowed man, probably from the 18th century. We found the giant but were in for a surprise. No, nothing torrid! The village in the shadow of the giant turned into one of the trip highlights - even though we'd read nothing about it! It had a beautiful church, historic houses, a monastery and friendly locals. But the light was fading, so we needed to move on.

Our home for the night (and next night and next night but more on that later) was Barrows Farmhouse in East Chinnock, near Yeovil, Somerset. Gorgeous! 19th century judge's manor with beautiful flagstone floors in the lower rooms and tasteful powder blue decor in our room. Our host recommended a nice little pub in the next town that provided us with a light dinner (given that we'd finished lunch just a couple hours prior). The plan was home to bed, but we had another surprise in store.

As we arrived home from dinner, we got a call from our wonderful cat-sitters. They just wanted to let us know that there had been a leak a couple floors above us and some had come into our apartment. Cat was fine, but one of our walls was not. After more calls, it seemed an emergency plumber was on the way, water had been stopped, so we were not to worry. We decided to sleep on the decision of whether to head home.

A lovely day greeted us in the morning and we decided that we would continue for the day then have another chat with our friends on the cat-sitting/leak scene.

This was our full birding day for the trip. First stop was complete bunk, but we righted ourselves quickly enough heading to the nearest RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) reserve. Highlight of stop one: Avocet. Haven't seen those since Texas. The song of a Cetti's Warbler (a regional speciality) blasted out of the reeds at stop two. We got a look at him on our way back to the car. Stop three yielded several highlights: 1. an adder - Britains only venomous snake (we stayed well away), 2. a Great Egret - not at all supposed to be here and 3. a Bittern. Bitterns are supposed to be in the area but they alluded us for most of our walk about the reserve only giving us a quick glimpse as we started back to the car.

We decided to go with recommendation of our Good Pub Guide for dinner, finding an okay pub in the country. They had one of my favourite's on tap: Doom Bar, a local brew. I ordered a nice salmon but was getting a strange feeling through dinner. Within hours I knew why - either a very nasty food poisoning or stomach bug that was making the rounds at the time. Slimmy joined me in miserable-ville within a couple hours, turning our super lovely room into a most unpleasant sick bay.

Up all night but finally some recovery in the morning. The day was stunning but we only saw it from our window, watching our host's son cut the grass in shorts during one of our few bursts of wakefulness. We finally stirred around 4 with just enough energy for a quick grocery run: ginger ale, sparkling water, water crackers, etc. Our host supplied us with a mindless comedy tape upon our return, although I dozed through it.

Twelve hours of good sleep and we were miles better but decided that the vacation had us beat. The last two days of our trip was supposed to be spent walking the hills of Dartmoor. We drove to Dartmoor, visited a very recently built castle them made our way to the Exeter train station headed for home.