Not a great start to the day as our carefully arranged plans for storing our extra two bags fell to pieces when the hotel reneged on its previously confirmed undertaking  to take them. As we were only allowed to take one bag each on the tour we were in a bit of a panic.

Fortunately Emmy, our Back Roads tour guide, saved the day. As there were only 15 people on the tour she was able to squeeze them in the baggage hold. So off we set on our 7 day Back Roads adventures to explore the wilds of darkest Cornwall.

Our little bus really squeezed down the English country lanes as we headed to our first stop of the day at the market town of Marlborough. Amazingly it was market day when we arrived and the allegedly widest High Street in England was filled with market stalls and people.

Our next stop was the town of Wells with its magnificent Cathedral, 

Vicars’ Close, the only existing intact medieval street in England,

And the amazing Bishop’s Palace which is in fact a Castle of considerable size. We had a lovely lunch at Goodfellows Restaurant then back on the bus as we headed for Dartmoor National Park.

Our route took us through incredibly cute little villages. The directors of Midsummer Murders would have no trouble finding locations here. Despite the very dry and hot summer they are experiencing, the countryside was very beautiful and we were particularly taken by the massed displays of Hydrangeas which seemed to grow like weeds in many locations.

Finally, after crossing a narrow bridge which was about 3 inches wider than our little bus, we made it into the Dartmoor National Park, stomping ground of Sherlock Holmes’ hound of the Baskervilles.

Now English National Parks are considerably different from Australian ones. To my untrained eye it was hard to distinguish the National Park from the country surrounding it. There are private houses, farms, fences etc just like outside the park’s boundary. In the middle however was a large unfenced bit filled with Dartmoor ponies, sheep and cattle all mixed in together and all privately owned.

The land here is covered with rocks, heavily grazed grass; horse, sheep and cattle droppings and Gorse bushes. Apparently back in the Bronze Age it was covered with Oaks. I reckon they should have a go at replanting it with trees. It would look fantastic in a couple of hundred years.

Our overnight stop was in the middle of the National Park at the Two Bridges Hotel deep in the Moors. The land here is apparently owned by Prince Charles who leases it to the hotel. It was a quaint, quirky place full of dark panelling with loads of copper and brass all polished to within an inch of its life. The hotel staff were very friendly, our room was very comfortable and the food was great.

They had a herd of around eight geese which populated the front of the hotel and who, as the sun set with a rather chilly wind blowing, settled down for the night in the middle of the bitumen area at the front of the hotel. On the following morning I watched the groundsman feeding them which involved a ritual which I am sure must be repeated daily. The groundsman headed to his shed and came out with a bucket of food. The geese lined up and the head goose had a feed from the bucket. The groundsman walked down to the lower lawn, the head goose and four others followed, and three stayed behind. The groundsman scattered the food on the lower lawn which this party ate, then he came back up and scattered food on the top lawn, which two of the three remaining geese ate, while the very last goose had his breakfast out of the bucket.

Well after a two year break, Jeanette and I are off again which means me blowing the dust off my Blogger’s pen and getting back to work.

It is amazing how much has changed since we last went roaming. For starters, our hire car outfit which we always book to take us to the airport no longer drives the very elegant Australian Made Holden Calais but rather a great Chevy tank with a Holden badge on it. On the plus side there was tons of room for us and our baggage. On the negative side, it looked very cheap  and tinny and the heating controls had malfunctioned just before the driver got to our house and were stuck on 25c.

To offset the oven effect he had cracked the window on my side with the result we froze when moving and cooked when stopped.

At the airport Singapore Airlines had automated their check in processes. We were confronted with a sea of shiny white machines that were designed to weigh your luggage, scan your passport and print luggage tags and boarding passes. There were two problems however. No one had turned on the machines and there was not a single staff member anywhere to be seen.

The chaos gradually built up as more and more passengers kept arriving, each one going through the initiation rite of vainly punching the keyboards trying to get the machines to do something. Finally the machines came to life and there was a flurry of activity as baggage labels were printed and put on bags and boarding passes collected but there was still no sign of any staff.

The crowd kept building up and we had got to the stage where some of the more enterprising passengers were starting to work on a way of shoving their bags down the baggage shute, when  three Singapore Airline employees appeared.

One hit the First/ Business class counter and started sorting out the top end of town. One got immersed with about 40 Asian students who were travelling as a group. The third, a lady, sort of did a goldilocks thing of trying out the chairs at each of the check in desks in turn then retreated to the furtherest desk, immersed herself in a computer screen then got up and left.

But this time the crowd had grown to a couple of hundred and was starting to get ugly. The bloke who did not seem to be making any progress with his group check in, and sensing the likelihood of him being lynched by an irate mob which was growing by the minute, sent the lady on the First Class desk scurrying off with instructions to “get some people down here now. I don’t care who they are”.

So finally we got rid of our bags. Next Security. This area  was all new since our last trip. First being the suss characters we are, we were tested for explosive residue. Next the metal detector. Even after depositing all my worldly metallic objects in a tray and removing my belt I still set the damn machine off. More detailed scanning followed which revealed a suspicious object dead centre in the middle of my chest.

Since there was nothing actually there when I was physically checked I was sent on my way on to the next hurdle; the new automated border security processing set up. Jeanette went first, scanned her passport on the machine, stood where the machine told her on the footprints on the floor, looked at the screen as instructed but all to no avail. The machine could not match her with the passport. So she was sent off for manual processing

My turn next with exactly the same fail result. As a matter of fact, all the travellers we spoke to (not a large sample admittedly) had had the same experience.

Finally made it to the departure lounge  Large numbers of Singapore Airlines groundstaff finally showed up here having a good time socialising amongst themselves while the boarding proceeded in a confused jumble. After all this, I have to confess I was starting to have worries. But happily I was proven wrong – we had a good flight to Singapore with a friendly crew with the traditionally excellent Singapore Airlines service.

We had a three hour stop over in Singapore airport which got a bit extended due to a tropical storm closing refueling and loading operations. Eventually it passed and we were on ourway. We had an Airbus A380 for this leg, which is our preferred aircraft for long distance travels, and after 13 hours arrived into London, eventually found our driver and made it to our hotel and fell into bed.