The wind, the wind!! I don't know how many times i thought the whole tent was going to collapse. I found the best thing to do was to hide my head deeper inside my sleeping bag. Incidentally, i love my new sleeping bag - it is roomy and cosy - very nice. A successful purchase - hooray!!
Amazingly when we got up, the tent and windbreak were both intact. How i do not know. I really don't feel that it is down to my "skills" in putting them up, that's for sure!
The shower block is VERY nice - clean and warm. We may consider sleeping in there tonight if this wind keeps up.
Walked into St Ives, which was quite a pleasant 30 minute walk downhill, across a couple of fields first, and then down a narrow winding country lane between farmers fields before hitting the outskirts of the town with some nice cottages and bungalows. I suspect that we shall get the bus back to the site though as the hill is both long and steep in places.
St Ives itself is quite a nice little town. The streets are very narrow and the footpaths are mostly missing. It wasn't easy to get around the streets without getting run over - it must be an absolute nightmare in the height of the season. We found our way down to the harbour front where, guess what? It was windy! More so than at the camp site, so maybe we should count ourselves "lucky" tonight when the tent is flapping away like a demented bird.
After much searching, we finally found a pasty shop (!) and had a chickpea & potato pasty. Very nice it was too. Also had a Cornish Heavy Cake from a tiny bakers shop - the shop was only about the size of our bathroom - the queue for the shop had to wait outside! The cake was lovely, a cross between a rock cake, scone and chelsea bun.
St Ives has very few of the usual High Street shops, a tiny Boots and Woolworths, but apart from that, they were virtually all small independent and specialist shops. Lots of galleries, gift shops, pasty shops and surf shops.
Walked a bit more and ended up overlooking the beach and sitting in the sun. It was quite sheltered there, but the sun was very hot and quite blinding.
We had a very brief shower, but it soon passed, we walked back into the town centre and found the bus stop. The busses for the Park & Ride also pick up there, and we had the "pleasure" of being surrounded by a bunch of Northern chavs who were waiting to go back to the car park. Our bus, when it finally came, was a bit clapped out and only just made it back up the hill. I think we would have struggled even more though - Sally's pedometer read over 10,200 steps done.
Back in the tent, surprise surprise, it was very windy. Got the kettle on though and had a lovely mug of tea.
EVENING.
Having spent a couple of hours reading/sleeping, we had a lovely meal of fish fingers (cod) and baked beans (Heinz). It may not have been haute cuisine, but it really hit the spot and warmed us up for ten minutes or so.
We decided to take the windbreak down, before the wind did actually break it! Doing this has removed about 30% of the noise. We thought that our tent was having a good go at destroying itself in the wind, but looking at some of the others nearby, we seem to be doing OK. The only tents that don't appear to be in danger of self destructing are the proper frame ones. The snag is that these are expensive to buy, heavy to transport and take up lots of room when they are packed up. There is a wigwam tent in the next field. Looks good, but it cant have much room inside it you would imagine.
Having washed up, we retired to the bedroom for rampant.........chilling and reading. Thank goodness for a good book and "The Jazz" on the DAB radio - it is also the best way to keep warm! We were both in our sleeping bags with hoodies on, and must have looked like a pair of intrepid explorers. To this end, we made a video, just in case we don't make it back from the ice cap.
We did contemplate going into the club again this evening, if only to sit in the warm for a while and not have the walls moving around all the time. The thing that stopped us was that it is bingo night, and we weren't sure we could face that.
While we did some washing, we got talking to a couple who work on the site during the Summer. They told us that it has been windy the whole time that they have been here, and that the big give-away is that all the trees, bushes and hedges lean one way. Considering just how windy it is, the washing didn't dry very well.
Chicago is known as "the windy city". For me, Cornwall is "the windy county". Maybe it is the letter "C" that's the problem? Dorset was fine last year, so i'm going to call this place "Dornwall" from now on and see what happens.
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