Day 7: Lelant to Portreath

Day 7 was not an auspicious day....or perhaps it was for all the wrong reasons! The weather forcast had predicted occasional showers and as Lynne stood outside The Badger Inn waiting for Keith to fix up the bill (a task that the staff did not seem in any hurry to complete) she mused that the occasional showers were all falling in one job lot. How wrong can one be. When it wasn't actually raining it was what is often described in Britain as Missling and until this day we had not truly understood what that meant. The main disaster of the day was to happen much later and as a result of which there as no pictures to adorn our blog today.

 Despite that the day started reasonably well with the coastal path wending along the beach front on past Hayle and through pleasant dunes dotted with a picturesque collection of holiday shacks. But it all began to unravel when we must have missed the main path amongst a plethora of tracks through the dunes and ended up in a Holiday villages which seemed to have the proportions of a metropolis and at one stage it seemed we were doomed to wander aimlessly through its deserted streets for ever. 

Eventually we emerged but not onto the path; so we decided to embark on some road walking for a while. We made our way back to the track until we came level with Gwithian and headed inland to have lunch at the pub and a little more road walking to cut across a corner of the coastline. We rejoined the path at Hell's Mouth to revel in the dramatic cliffs and surging seas... So different from the more level coastline of earlier in the day. We made good time as the path stayed up on top of the cliffs and was thus fairly level if at times quite muddy. 

The gods had saved the best till last however and I'm sure they were laughing up their sleeves as we made our way along without a care in the world. As we passed a way marker that told us a mere 1.5 miles to go, we were elated... Nearly there. Ho oh, not so quick! As we rounded a bend and there was the steapest portion of the path we have encountered so far: it seemed to go straight down and then straight up the other side of a deep ravine. We made it however and the continued to climb until down below us nestled at he base of a steep slope was Portreath! The gods were not finished with us however: so enamoured by the scene and elated that we were nearly there Lynne just had to have that last photo of the village nestled below us. That was one picture too many. Bedeviled by the wind and rain, I was obviously not careful enough in manipulating the wet weather gear in order to replace the phone in my pocket and when we reached the B&B there was no phone to be found... Hence no pictures for today! We retraced our steps (straight back up the hill Uggggh) but no luck. As Ned Kelly said: such is life!