It makes you wish you were an otter.....

Well we’re back from our long bank holiday weekend, in the heart of Tarka country. We didn’t see any otters, but my mother will be glad to hear we stayed in a farmhouse where chooks tried to come inside whenever a door was left ajar.

We left London lateish Friday night, in a fairly successful bid to beat the traffic. We’d surrendered our eco-friendly credentials and hired a Renault Megane for the week, such decadence! As a consequence of our late departure, we didn’t get to Horn’s Cross until well after midnight.

Devon was lovely, lots of thatched cottages, old pubs, winding country lanes with hedges and little bridges, docile cows etc etc. It does seem to suffer from traffic problems though, but maybe it was because we were there in the school holidays. The weather was pretty dismal, but at least it didn’t rain. We had to fire up the Aga most days, and at 19C, the beaches might have been beautiful, but certainly weren’t enticing.

We didn’t realise that Bideford has one of the longest medieval bridges in Europe. It also has a very good curry house.

It was good to spend some time with Lee, Keirsty, Georgia (‘Why didn’t one of you sleep in the other bed?’), Joshua (‘Why are all the Daddies leaving?’) and Jamie, Julie, Karen, Sean, Maddie and Rueben, even if the kids were getting up at 7 am….. Some highlights included the day at Watermouth Castle, Clovelly and the scarecrow festival in Week St Mary, where a friend of mine lives. I even let my hair down and ate cream tea (devonshire teas, in fact) and pasties. All that pastry and clotted cream doesn’t bode well for Stiges though. Maybe I’ll just have to go to bear bars – my newly bearded face might get me past the door. At least on holiday I got to read up on celebrity gossip in Heat magazine and other quality titles - I'll be able to out-gossip everyone else in the villa.
More pics can be found here.