Rachel Miller Photographer: 2011

Sunday 16 October 2011

Sunday 17 July 2011

The Lost Gardens of Heligan - shouldn't these be the Gardens of Heligan now that they have been found? Anyway, they were very pretty, especially the jungle bit. I do like that you can step into the middle of a jungle (see bottom pic) in the UK.

The Eden Project. I'd been warned it was boring and perhaps this low expectation is what made it so enjoyable - I really did love the Rainforest biome (pictured). I know the giftshop is commercial and the organic kitchen where food is served on wooden boards and the lemonade costs £2 is fairly pretentious but it doesn't detract at all from the excitement of coming across the great big futuristic biodomes lying in front of you in an old clay pit, surrounded by thousands of plants planted and weeded by over 50 gardeners. Also, the white hot air balloon they use to get to the tops of the trees to prune them looks so Victorian in this futuristic setting - it's wonderful.

View from Fowey on a grey day - we had seafood and pizza and I heard a woman shout at a seagull for stealing her sandwich.

Surfers at Watergate Bay. We did some surfing and it was fun. There were some genuinely perilous moments - at one point Thom actually surfed over me, quite a trick on his part, and I watched the white board float over my head in a pretty relaxed state all things considered.

We went for a walk between Watergate Bay and Newquay - it was positively tropical!

Bath

This was the late afternoon view from our hotel room.

The Roman Baths - these are not Romans.

I love a good boat ride. We went on a Pulteney Cruiser. There were tons of people rowing boats on the River Avon (not, the guide stated emphatically, the Avon in Stratford-upon-Avon... there are 7 different Avons in Britain don't you know because the word Avon is an old Saxon word for river. There, I learned something.) who clearly were even less talented at rowing than me. This resulted in some near misses and a head on collision which then caused a bit of an altercation between the young men on the rowing boat and the men on the cruiser, who I wouldn't have messed with, especially as their boat was 20 times the size of the row boats. Anyway, apart from that, it was very relaxing and we saw lots of ducks and a swan family with cygnets.