South West Coastal Path 2015 Day 13

Sunday 6^th September 2015

Off on the path, and about an hour in I ran into the same guy I’d seen yesterday, who told me his name was Rob and that he was from the Netherlands.  He walked at a slower pace than I did, but I walked with him for the rest of the day anyway. There's nothing like walking with someone to curb your tendency to whip out the camera every few seconds; consequently the number of photos today remained more manageable.

There is a little story about this next photo.  Rob did not know I took it.  When I told him, either he asked or I offered for me to email it to him when I had a chance.  He wrote my email address in my trail guide book so I would remember.  As chance would have it, my stuff all went into storage in New Zealand for many years and I did not have ready access to it.  I pulled it all out a couple of months back to put all of my guidebooks on a bookshelf, and I located all of the digital photos I took and finally put them all somewhere easily accessible.  Now, here I am writing blogs for all of the walks I have done in the past, and finally have come across that photo of Rob.  I still haven't emailed it to him (and it has been about 4 and a half years), but now all I have to do is look through the guidebook to find his email.  Hopefully he still has the same one.  I'll send him a link to this blog as well, so he can relive the days on the South West Coastal Path, just as I am doing now.

Rob, doing the typical walker pose

I was keen to see Port Isaac, as it the stand-in for the fictional Port Wen in the television program Doc Martin.  Although I could see some obvious locations, the town was very touristy (unlike how it is portrayed in the program) and I was disappointed.

Rob had not pre-booked accommodation for Port Isaac, and when we arrived, I accompanied him as he walked around the village trying to find something reasonable, but they ranged between £95 and £150 for a single room.  I called the B&B I was staying at in a nearby village (I forget the name, but the B&B was called Lane End but, as I type this up, is no longer in operation) and they had a room free, but it would need cleaning.  We waited in Port Isaac for a while until the B&B owner showed up to drive us there.  In the village, we went to a nearby pub for dinner.

Day 14