Pendoggett Day 1 (Saturday) U turn if you want to (but I HAVE to)

Having taken Brody to my sisters for the fortnight, we packed up and left about 10am for the five-and-a-half-hour drive to the north coast of Cornwall.  The traffic was slowing our journey, but the ETA on the sat-nav remained at 3:28pm.  We were planning two stops, so the earliest time of arrival (4pm) would not ever be achieved. The Dartford crossing was not a problem, but further round the traffic slowed to almost a halt.  We were offered an alternative route to save five minutes – which I readily accepted.  It took us off the motorway and through various town centres.  The first U-turn was in Farnham, I think.  Instead of a right turn, which is forbidden, go left to do a U-turn (round the station entrance) then cross the junction and the right turn is achieved.  All very slow! Later, another turn was misinterpreted, and we and we ended up going round a ‘circle’ until we got back on the right route. By the time we got to the A-303 (and after a short stop for lunch) the ETA was showing 5:29pm – we had lost nearly 2 hours to the traffic. 

After a second short stop, which was partly to allow for some movement, and partly to get out of the heat.  Somewhere in the traffic, the air conditioning had effectively given up and was blowing warm air into the car.  Windows are great for cooling, but not that good on a day when temperatures reached 27C.

We arrived in Pendoggett around 5:45, the last part of the directions say “after about 6 miles look out for a pub on the right”, but don’t tell you it’s name.  We spotted the pub easily enough, but missed the earlier board advertising it (it was on the left), so went straight past, and had to do our third turn around.  The house is not easy to find because the name plate is obscured by a large fuchsia bush, but we did find it after a bit of looking. Then there is the challenge of the key safe – easy enough to put the combination in, but much harder to get the door to open.

Once inside, the house is spacious, and easily suitable for four, plenty of us two. The Wi-Fi is not working, there is a replacement router coming.  Surely it would be a simple thing to leave a note next to the router to let us know - they had to come in to clean!

We had a lovely 3-course meal in the pub garden, still in warm sunshine beyond 8pm in the evening and followed up with a short walk, then more unpacking, an hour’s TV, and off to bed.

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Miles driven: 288.1

Peril Index
A Peril Index will be added to the bottom of some posts, to indicate how much (or little) peril we were in. The scale is 0 to 10. 0 is normal life. 10 is, for example, an early 20th century visit to Antarctica.