Wednesday 08 July 2009 - Mousehole to Derby

We had organised our return transport by booking a hire van from a national company and arranging to drop it off at their depot in Derby the next day. The van would be driven to our B&B to pick us and our bikes up, and then take us back to the depot in Penzance to complete the paperwork. It wasn’t due to arrive until 9am, so we had time for a fairly leisurely breakfast.The dining room was in a conservatory overlooking Mount’s Bay with views towards St Michael’s Mount and Penzance, and we shared it with a retired couple who were walking across the south of the country and who made the final donation that we received en route.
We waited opposite the B&B for twenty minutes with no sign of our van, entertaining ourselves by watching a seal close to the shore. Oddly, at one point my boss from work drove by - he was on holiday in Cornwall and he and his wife were on their way to the Mynack Theatre, as he told me later. Finally a woman from the hire company turned up in a small car to pick us up, obviously unaware that we had bikes with us. She set off back to Penzance with the promise that the van would be with us soon, and a long soon later it arrived. By the time we’d completed all the necessaries at Penzance and set off on the journey home, it was past 11am.
As we approached Bodmin Moor, the blue skies were replaced by threatening clouds, and rain was falling when we reached Jamaica Inn where we stopped for a coffee. The weather cleared and the sun returned as soon as we left the moor behind. All went well as we sped through the West Country and then headed north past Gloucester and Worcester, calling en route at a typically grim service station for another coffee, but then Paul took the wrong strand of Brum spaghetti and we found ourselves heading towards Hinckley and the M1. Paul was furious and very sweary for many miles, and was still quite grumpy when he dropped me off at my house at about 6pm.
And that was it.