We've reached that point. Minehead edition.

On these kinds of trips, where you're doing stuff every day, I always seem to reach a point where I can't keep up with recording what's happened. We're a week in, and yesterday I couldn't finish what I had to say about the day. Of course, it didn't help that there wasn't a chair in the B&B room, so there wasn't any place proper to sit and write. But if I wanted to I could nothing except do stuff and write about it and nothing else. I brought a book. I've read 20 pages and it's already due back at the library.

Oh well, enough whining. So yesterday we finished up our time in the West, in a town called Minehead on the north coast at the edge of an area called Exmoor, which is an AONB, British for Area of Natural Beauty. There are many of these scattered around. I think we're in another one today and yet another one tomorrow. It is quite beautiful though.

We stayed in a B&B, which was very pleasant and would have been fine if it weren't unusually hot here right now. There was no air conditioning and the fan made it just barely bearable. I can't believe I've never used that phrase before; it's so alliterative.

The town is odd, though not unpleasant in any way. It's on the sea, so there's all that kind of seaside stuff, like arcades and ice cream stands. On the main street, there are a surprisingly large number of second hand stores, as if everyone who had too many things had moved there and then suddenly realized that they had too many things. There also seem to be a lot of shops and "centers" that cater to the elderly, and there seem to be several retirement communities. Maybe people still come to the seaside to try to restore their health. I'm not sure about that. There were a couple of funeral homes too.

We ate at a nice pub restaurant recommended by the B&B hosts out of the limited number of restaurants that are open on Sunday night (lunch is the big meal on Sunday). It was called The Old Ship Aground, and it was located right on the shore, so it's entirely possible that there was at least one ship aground there at the time they opened. In fact, all the boats there were aground, because Minehead has the second largest difference between high and low tides after the Bay of Fundy, where the tidal forces are so great that you can pick shellfish on the floor of the bay at noon and whitewater raft back up it at 4. Because of when we arrived and left, we never got to see it at high tide. Here are some pictures:

 

After a surprisingly good dinner and a couple of unsurprisingly good pints of bitter, we went back to the room. By this time my body could not sit anymore, after lots of driving then sitting in a restaurant, so I stood and read the newspaper and wrote to the extent I could. Then I went for a walk at around 11. There wasn't much open around that time except for 2 rival (I assume) kebab shops and an Indian restaurant. A couple of pubs were in the midst of closing down. There were several groups of young people (you know, those young people) and I opted to walk near the ones that were mixed guys and girls, because the guys sounded much happier and those groups. And if I'm going to be around groups of drunk guys, I prefer the happy ones. I didn't feel threatened or anything. It's just risk aversion.

After a decent, if warm, night of sleep, I went for a walk up and down the seaside. The air was cool and smelled fresh, like the seaside should. I would have stuck a toe in the water but the tide was so low it was at least a quarter mile just to get across the beach. I walked back home, we had breakfast and left for the Midlands.