A Fine Day in Falmouth

Our cruise ship, the Minerva II, is now ambling its way toward Dartmouth, our next stop on the south coast of England, after a day in port at Falmouth. By all accounts, it was a great day. Some passengers spent the day poking around the town of Falmouth, which has beautiful homes and lots of -- believe it or not -- palm trees. (This area is *very* temperate compared to the rest of England -- apparently the jet stream has something to do with that.) Others took an excursion to the Eden Project, which I don't know as much about as I should (just Google it if you'd like to find out more), and others went to St. Michael's Mount, a very picturesque castle that at high tide is on an island. At low tide you walk across a stone causeway to get to it; at high tide you take a boat.

But the most popular excursion, and the one I took, was to the town of St. Ives. It's a little hard to explain where this stuff is, but if you think of the southwest tip of England as kind of a backwards "L," Dartmouth is on the bottom of the horizontal leg and St. Ives is on the top. (That doesn't really help, does it?) Falmouth is on the English Channel, while if you drive just an hour north to St. Ives, suddenly you're looking out at the North Atlantic. Anyway, St. Ives is a lovely seacoast town, home to a branch of the Tate Gallery -- a popular art museum -- as well as many shops, cobblestone streets, shops, cafes, shops, small art galleries, shops, stone cottages, and shops. Did I mention how many shops there are in St. Ives? There is everything from art prints to jewelry to Cornish pastries (meat-filled, mostly) to surfing gear to fudge made with clotted cream.

Before this trip is over, I intend to find out exactly what clotted cream is.

Maybe even better than St. Ives itself was the drive to and from it. The Cornwall countryside is right out of a jigsaw puzzle -- lush green rolling hills dotted by stone buildings: stone houses, stone churches, stone walls, stone barns.

The ship pushed away from the pier tonight during dinner and is now headed toward Dartmouth, where we'll dock at about 8:00 tomorrow morning local time. After a day in Dartmouth, it's off to Alderney (one of the Channel Islands) and Portland (no, not the one in Oregon), then to Dover, where we get off the ship and head up to London for a day and a half.

Man, I could get used to this....