Rounding Up

It occurred to me recently that if I don't finish the story of our trip to Devon soon we will be on our way to Yorkshire and I will then have another set of tales to tell....So here we go. On our second full day we spent the morning in Exeter. We split up as I had arranged to meet up with a friend from Ravelry, and OH and his Mum went to the Museum, where as far as I can make out they spent most of their time in the café having a good long talk. They did pass a Pandora stockist though and he bought me a wooden bead. Which was nice. Meanwhile friend and I  had coffee, followed by a trip to a very well stocked shop called Expressions, and then had lunch in a very nice pub.

 

I had to laugh because I paid for this with my debit card. My debit card has a picture on it of the Stones of Callenish  on the Isle of Lewis. When I handed it over the guy glanced at it and said 'Oh I used to live near there. Stonehenge.' When I told this story to Son No 1, he said 'Oh, you didn't. Please tell me you didn't embarrass him....'. Well I didn't. I was so flabbergasted I was struck dumb to be honest. However unlike the OH I don't expect everyone I meet to have a working knowledge of a) every significant stone age monument in Britain or b) archaeology in Scotland.

 

In the afternoon my mother in law suggested that we go to Otterton Mill which we did. We weren't hungry enough to sample the café but we did a little light shopping and, as is my current wont, I took a photo of a tree in blossom.

 

Possibly the blossom isn't showing up so well there. As I get older I get more and more haunted by Houseman's lines about cherry blossom

Of my three score years and ten, twenty will not come again,
....and since to look at things in bloom fifty years is little room....

and quite a lot more than twenty of my allotted span has passed.

We took two days over getting home, partly as mentioned previously to pick up the OH's new toy in Sale. The next morning we took ourselves off to the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight. I have a passing interest in workers model villages and had not visited this one before. The pictures aren't brilliant but for what they're worth:-

 

 

Mock Tudor houses. Also fountains are very difficult to get right!

 

Moving on, the main event was the Gallery but I found it very disappointing. They do have a collection of Pre-Raphs, a whole big roomful in fact, but several are versions of pictures I've seen elsewhere, several are just awful - Bubbles, for example, and all in all, I think either the Laing in Newcastle or Birmingham City Art Gallery are better for Pre-Raphs, if they're your thing. In addition the café was dark and noisy and the shop was a great disappointment. No postcards, no jigsaw puzzles. And a lot of stuff totally unrelated to the collection.

 

There was one really lovely picture though

 



Sybilla Palmifera. The colours in that reproduction are rubbish. But that, and a couple of Waterhouses made the trip worthwhile.

After Port Sunlight we headed north and stayed overnight in the very welcoming and restful Hightae Inn where we had the first comfortable bed we'd had for almost a week. The food was wonderful too. I tend not to eat much when I'm travelling but here are the OH's starter and main

smoked duck salad and salmon steak. When we come home from our projected trip to Yorkshire in September we are seriously thinking of staying here again. Highly recommended if you're wanting somewhere to stay near Lockerbie.

And next day it was a case of home again, home again. And it was Good to be Back.