The Ham Nomads

1 Sep 2014. <GB-ENG> Penzance, Corn —

Today dawned rather strangely (although, according to reputation, not so strangely for Cornwall). There was a fairly deep fog, which felt like a penetrating drizzle. Apparently there's a word for it here — 'mizzle'.

We decided to have a housekeeping day. We went in to Penzance, parked, found a laundry and organised to get our laundry done. Apparently it was the attendant's 24th wedding anniversary, and she was looking forward to a pleasant night out with her husband — so we returned to pick up the laundry at about 4pm to give her plenty of time for her night out!

While waiting for the laundry, we dropped over to Macca's so Warren could catch up a little on the blog. We would have gone over to St Michael's Mount, off the coast at Penzance, if we could see it. But today was mizzly, and the Mount only loomed occasionally out of the mist.

Warren's been here before?

Low tide at Penzance

We went back into Penzance. We walked a short way round the beachfront. There's a sea wall that really intrigued us — it's concrete, and curved like a breaking wave so as to throw back severe waves during storms. We then walked the streets to get a feel for the place. There are many stores run by the various charities. We took our parcels containing the collected books from our various destinations over the past couple of months, intending to post them home.

The way we had packed them, each of the two 6kg boxes would have cost nearly £100 to post. We were advised that, if we packed into 3 boxes, each under 5kg, we could take advantage of print post, with each 5kg parcel costing only about £30 to post — so, instead of it costing about £200 to post the lot, we would only have to pay £100. So we took the books back to the van, and repacked them.

St Michael's Mount finally put in an appearance!

We went back to the layby we camped in last night — it's so close, and so convenient. Turns out that there's a horse wagon with the same idea — but there's so much space here, that this is not a problem!

Distance driven — today, 20 miles ( 32 km ); to date, 6,846 miles ( 11,018 km )