Day 15
St Ives to Penzance via Land's End
Planned mileage: 34 miles
Actual mileage: 36 miles (overshot our accommodation and had to retrace steps)
Cycling time: 2 hrs 45½ mins
Average speed: 13 mph
Maximum speed: 34.4 mph
Accomodation: Guest Lodge, Penzance - http://www.guestlodgepenzance.co.uk/
Ok statistics fans, I've done the numbers and... including our rest day trip to the Eden Project which distorts them a little, here's the summary.
Total mileage: 833.73 miles
Total cycling time: 59 hrs 22 mins 33 secs
Overall average speed: 14.04 mph
Average daily mileage: 59.55 miles
Average daily riding time: 4 hrs 14½ mins
So we could've done it more quickly, but we've really enjoyed our riding as a proper holiday. The times of course don't include stops, so we were actually out and about on the road for a big proportion of each day.
What is absolutely amazing to me is that we haven't got properly rained on for over a fortnight. It's been wet overnight (once torrentially) twice and the one time it did rain during the day (today – very hard for less than a minute), we happened by pure fluke to be inside having a cream tea anyway! So sorry if you've had a soggy time of it, but we certainly haven't and have made the most of the sunshine.
Anyway, back to today...Slept incredibly well and were very reluctant to be up even in time to get to breakfast for 9am as we'd planned. Fortunately there was no rush as we knew we'd only 30 odd miles to cycle. I'm sorry, but serve-yourself cooked breakfast from a buffet in a reasonable sized hotel is nothing like as nice or personal as anything we've had in any of the B&B's we stayed in. Even the yoghurt wasn't Cornish, although everything was still pretty tasty.
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| Stunning St Ives |
Leaving our bikes parked and our baggage locked away at the hotel, we enjoyed the great sunshine whilst wandering down into St Ives town, viewing the scenery, coastline and generally vibrant atmosphere. Having said we'd be 30ish minutes, we were actually about 90 minutes as we went all the way down to and around 'The Island' which gave incredible views around 360 degrees. Very, very reluctant to leave. St Ives is full of steep, tiny streets with excellent looking (we only bought one single postcard) shops.
We did eventually tear ourselves away and started our climb up out of St Ives. And for the next 6 miles against a strong headwind, pretty exclusively we climbed – hard work! Fortunately, most of the rest of the route (into & out of St Just excluded) to Land's End was much easier pedalling. Quite a bleak landscape in places (though still very colourful, with loads of wild flowers all around us) with lots of evidence of old mineworkings. There are SO many things to see round here that we just have to come back another time. Bring back the overnight sleeper train service to Penzance and we'll be the first to book!
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| Land's End - we made it! |
Now, Land's End has a reputation for being a bit tacky so we had pretty low expectations. So we were pleasantly surprised to find it full of tourist attractions (including a great little free “End to End” exhibition) and slightly overpriced cafes, but no amusement arcades or anything similarly grim. We ate our mini picnic lunch on a bench overlooking the Atlantic (very dramatic in the sunshine) before venturing into tourist central to take a few photos in front of that famous signpost. Sorry, but we weren't queuing up and paying someone else to do it for us 'properly'.
A much quicker onward journey to Penzance as we had a great tailwind to help us along. The scenery was quite different too, although certainly not entirely without short, sharp hills to ensure we stayed awake! Shortly before 4 we arrived in Mousehole and had our first and only proper Cornish cream tea in the Pilchard Press Cafe – yum. 'That' rain (which sounded like someone was chucking buckets of water noisily on the floor) happened a few minutes after we sat down – purely, purely by coincidence I promise. A rapid spin around the very attractive harbour and we were off for the final 3 flat miles of our route – back in the sunshine again.
We spotted Penzance station (very useful for our train in the morning) when we overshot our Guest Lodge and had to return all the way along the promenade – oh well, a good way to rapidly see just a little of the seafront. We checked in at the very nice looking Beachfield Hotel, abandoned our bikes in a corridor by reception and went off round the corner to find our accommodation which is in a building next door. Quite an odd arrangement, but the room is pleasant, clean and quiet with its own fridge.
Having discovered that breakfast in the hotel in the morning is early enough for us to catch our train we only needed to buy lunch, snacks and celebratory bottle of wine at the local Co-Op on the High Street. Meandered back along the length of the prom and were very impressed with Penzance which seems to have plenty going for it. For the first and only time this holiday we decided to have fish and chips in a proper fish and chips restaurant – yummy! Back in our room nice and early with Vimto and Twix for pudding. Very pleased with our achievements, although almost wondering if we can fit in a long weekend later this year to finish off the journey by bike to John O'Groats... Also a little sad that our holiday is almost over – it's been a really fun adventure!
There may well be more reflections on our experiences written on the train tomorrow – watch this space!
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