(written by Dave)

What good timing we have.  The last two days have been very wet here in Newlyn and the BBC has featured headlines like those below.

UK braced for one month of rainfall in 24 hours

Autumn arrives with full force as parts of the UK expect wind speeds of up to 60mph and 80mm of rain today

Several rivers have flooded in the southwest and towns that we passed through only days ago have been mentioned specifically on the news.  Yesterday we were more than happy to sit in our cosy little cottage and watch the squalls pass.  We saw the forecast for bad weather on Sunday (yesterday) almost a week in advance and pushed to finish up on Saturday.  This is quite ironic as on this trip we’ve really only ever planned based on weather two days out at the most.  Forecasts typically change a lot in two days, plus our progress in the same time period can be a little unpredictable.  No the matter the reason, Sunday in particular would have been a very ugly day to be on a bicycle here in southwest England.  Good fortune or good planning, we were pretty happy to be spectators, not riders, on Sunday.

We’ve slept late the last two days.  No doubt we needed to catch up on sleep and give our bodies a proper rest.  As we’ve both mentioned, JOGLE was harder than we anticipated.  On our first day here neither of us left the house.  Today, mainly because we were out of food, we had to venture into town.  The hill/walk to and from town is steep (16%) but we made it without issues – somehow it is easier without a 60kg bike.  We now have enough food to last a few days so we may just hunker down and enjoy the break.

Newlyn is billed as England’s largest fishing port.  There is a pretty good sized fleet in the harbour and some fairly active looking processing plants.  With all this seafood, we had to try out the fish and chips shop for lunch.  We timed it perfectly between storms and were able to sit on the harbour foreshore while we enjoyed some locally caught fish and a few too many chips.  It was too early in the day to drink our celebratory English bitter, but we identified a couple pubs to sample one night later in the week.

I snapped a few photos of town and boats in the harbour.  Most of the fishing boats are built with very high gunnels – it would seem that the North Atlantic is not the calmest sea in the world for fishing.  Sailing the seas (or fishing them) always sounds so romantic but after taking a look around the harbor today, I think I’ll stick to fish and chip shops.  There are a couple “just off the boat” fish shops in town.  We made a list of what they have fresh and are planning on buying some later in the week, once we’ve searched the internet for the best ways to cook it (Editor’s note: there he goes again putting romantic and sailing in the same sentence – not going to happen!).

So, that’s it.  We are still mulling over ideas for the next phase of the journey.  We’ll make some decisions soon and post an update.  We need to give the bikes a good look over as well.  Wherever we go, our confidence in the bikes is not super high at this point.  Too many bits have been breaking of late so a very close inspection is in order.

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