Meant to include this photo in yesterdays post, looking out the bedroom window at Paignton. Both rooms were at the front of the B&B hotel.
We found a place called Chudleigh where one of Gary’s work colleague’s family came from in about the 1100s and stopped for a look. Again we had a look at the local church, parts of which date back to the early 1100s.
One of the small issues we have is that the National Trust properties usually don’t open ‘til 11am, which means that we aren’t able to visit any for the first couple of hours of our day. We did call into Castle Drogo, near Drewsteignton, Devon, England. It was built from 1911 and was finished in 1930 for Julius Drewe (businessman and founder of the Home and Colonial Stores) to designs by architect Edwin Lutyens, and is a Grade I listed building. It is currently undergoing a 5-year conservation project (2013-2017) to finally make it watertight. Castle Drogo was the last castle to be built in England. A scaffold tower has been built there to allow visitors to see part of the conservation works. It took about 15 weeks to erect the scaffolding and cover it.
From there we headed to the north coast/Bristol channel, via Dunster to Minehead. With a combination of the inbuilt GPS and human intervention, we travelled along a number of very narrow, 1 car width roads. Many times we experienced the extreme politeness of the British motorist, stopping to let us past, reversing to a passing bay and always a thank you wave. Pity Australian drivers are not more like this.
We are now in a very comfortable B&B and with a co-incidence that couldn’t happen again, in the same B&B that R&G stayed in about 2 years ago. We had parked the car and G&R went looking for somewhere for the night and this place started to look familiar, the entrance door, the combination lock on the door, a table in the entrance hall and even an upstairs door on an unusual angle. Sure enough Gill found our entry in the visitor’s book dated 8 June 2013.
On to Bristol tomorrow.
