Family ties and holidaying in Cornwall

We have just come back from a long planned holiday in Cornwall with my mother in law from New Zealand and my family and kids and it was certainly an eventful time. We stayed in a lovely little cottage at Lower Trengale Farm which I would highly recommend to anyone going down that way. I enjoyed making a fire and running around outside with my son and some friends he made and I think my wife and parents enjoyed the nice homely atmosphere.

Firstly one of the main reasons we went down was to retrace some family history for my wife and her mum, her distant relatives are the Couch family (and surprisingly Nigel Havers who went to some of the places we went to in “Who do you think you are”  is also a very distant relation) and they are  pretty much the stalwarts of the towns of Fowey and Polperro.

The town of “Minions” which my son found amusing.

We spent a little bit of time and went around to Talland beach next to Polperro,  which when myself and wife went to a couple of years ago struck me very much as the spitting image of Rapaki bay in New Zealand which is where her family setup on arrival to NZ. Talland is a wonderful spot and a bit undiscovered by tourism in the same way as Rapaki.

Rapaki NZ

Talland Cornwall

Part of me wonders if there was any coincidence in that her family went to live halfway around the world only to settle in an almost identical setting to what they would have found in dear old blighty (pictured together to the right). It was certainly a nice day when we were there anyway and I got to climb around on the rocks (like I tended to do when at Rapaki) as well and built sandcastles with my son. Other spots visited were Couch’s mill which was named after one of her relatives and Fowey which has a statue of Arthur Quiller Couch and a placard on where he used to live.

I got to hold an owl at Screech owl sanctuary as well as feeding some Emu’s (my son wouldn’t do it and looked at me like I was mad!!) this is a great place to go for families and some of the owls were used for filming of the film Legend of the Guardians so the owl I held was actually a Celebrity of the bird (rather than cruise) kind.

As is normal in the UK the weather on our holiday was fairly changeable, on the way home we got a flat tyre in the middle of Dartmoor and as I was changing the spare on to the car it decided to tip down with rain and have a thunderstorm leaving me soaked in the process and delaying our return as we overnighted in a hotel on the way home instead of doing the drive back to Southampton in one go, happy days.

Dartmoor before I had to put on our spare tyre and the heavens opened!

Me holding a famous owl (Soren from Legend of the Guardians)

All in all though we had a great time down in Cornwall and even though the rest of my year is looking pretty cruise centric in terms of travel I do love our little holidays away in the UK!!