Dedicated to my grandparents, Joan, Ernest, Marg and Bruce.

STOP THE PRESS! The official Confiscated Toothpaste video of this trip is now available. Be sure to check it out after you’ve read the article!

We’re standing in a dingy parking garage on Edgware Road after a couple of outstanding days in Little Venice in London: our stay at the superb Colonnade Hotel punctuated by pints next door at the sensational Prince Alfred Pub (a former gin palace) and marred only by the poorly tempered minicab driver the Colonnade found to drive us to the aforementioned garage instead of calling us a regular cab.

After some arguments with this idiot about the price of our short trip, the capably brutish woman at the Sixt counter takes one look at our papers and walks to the office door where she bellows “RUSSELL!” into the gloom. Her reverberations finding no reply, she storms off to give Russell his come-uppance. Moments later the unfortunate Russell pulls up in a sparkling blue BMW 3, much to our delight.

“You got upgraded, innit,” he tells us grammatically.

We plot a haphazardly southbound journey out of London (who needs a map? Not us!), crossing the Thames over the Hammersmith Bridge. Before I continue, I should point out that the “we” in this story is my father and I. Having barely travelled together since I attained adulthood over a decade ago, he’s jealous of my mum’s trip to Italy for a language course and decides to come along on my trip. I’m grateful for the company and the father-son bonding, not to mention his knowledge of the countryside in the south of England. Though he’s not as

travelled as I, he’s been in this part of the world countless times, and nary a town nor hamlet appears on the map that he hasn’t previously graced with his parental presence.

By contrast, England never interested me until recently. My early backpacking days were filled with mountains and ice and snow and golden-skinned Scandinavian goddesses, and wild parties and cheap beer in hot, humid locales in South-East Asia. (Or at least that’s my rose-tinged reflection.) England didn’t seem exotic enough for this Aussie, the cultural appeal of a plate of fish and soggy chips cooked by a man named Roger and eaten on a sodden shingle beach in the rain.

Of course, I was merely ignorant of the fact that England is brilliant.

We meander through the West Sussex countryside, and our first stop is Arundel, where there is a whopping great castle. The sort of thing you dream of as a kid reading King Arthur stories is suddenly a reality, resplendent with towering turrets and ramparts where archers once stood. We continue on and stop for lunch at a pub in an impossibly picturesque stone building, the first of many pub meals with the quality of the food matched only by the charm of the location.

Finally, we reach the coastline at Bosham, and this is our final destination for the day. Bosham has a  pretty little tidal harbour, and we arrive with the tide fully out and the boats lying on dry ground, which amazes me. At low tide there is an old road around the edge of the harbour wall, but as we drive around it we realise the tide is actually rising and we have to do a dicey three-point turn in several inches of ever-increasing saltwater and come back the way we came. Happily, we find a bed for the night at the local hotel, the sunset is spectacular and the people are friendly. I go for one of those evening wanders alone to take in the sea air and take photographs and the atmosphere is silently electric. It’s so good to be in a new place and on adventure!

Day 2 dawns with much promise and we zoom out of town in our Beemer. We round Portsmouth and Southampton and plot a course that takes us through the middle of the New Forest. I’m ecstatic in the rapidly changing landscape and the New Forest is like something out of a fairytale. It’s green and lush and rather than being the imposing, dark wood I imagined it’s surprisingly open and covered in mossy heathland. It’s beautiful. The forest has a number of wild ponies and donkeys and we spot a number when we stop at the little town of Lyndhurst. Keen to make some distance on the day’s trip, we stop only long enough for a brief foray through the trees, a chat to a B&B owner and a play with some cute piglets on a little farm. “There’ll be plenty more forest after this,” Dad claims but all too soon the misty forest disappears and we’re back out in a sunny coastal environment, this time in Dorset. It becomes my first regret on our trip and the first lesson. We in Australia always think of England as small, but there is a lot to see in these isles. Double the amount of time you think you will need.

The pretty little harbour of Weymouth becomes our first big navigational fail and one I’m ashamed to have to take responsibility for, as I was in the passenger seat navigating at the time. After spending some time in the pleasant sunny harbour full of fishing boats and cobblestones embedded with steel rails, soaking up some rays and the scenery, we plot a somewhat confusing trail out of town.  The road goes by and about half an hour later we emerge into a pleasant sunny harbour full of fishing boats and cobblestones embedded with steel rails. The same bloody one! Yep, it turns out we’ve been driving in a large circle. “We’re definitely buying a map at the next servo,” Dad states. Though as we are males we of course don’t and by the end of the afternoon, we are well on our way along the Jurassic Coast to our destination of Lyme Regis, a resort town on a hillside in West Dorset.

Again due to the fact that we are males, we haven’t booked any accommodation ahead of time and we spend some time huffing and puffing up the hill until we end up in the strangest little oddity of a hotel I’ve ever stayed. Strange even by English standards, this building has been modified about a thousand times and it’s all tapering zig-zag hallways and levels that might best be described as “fluid”, with the actual altitude changing frequently as we walk between each other’s rooms, nominally both on “Level 1”. Dad’s developed a horrible chesty cough and we’ve decided on separate rooms for a couple of days both to try and prevent me getting sick (which fails) and to allow me to get a decent night’s sleep (which is more successful).

Did I mention that Lyme Regis is on the Jurassic Coast? Ah yes, I see I did. This coastline is bloody old, spanning the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, and the area is full of fossils of large and small non-hairy animals. We take a walk along the pebbly beach, which the Poms inexplicably call a shingle beach, and hang out on the harbour wall, which the Poms inexplicably call a “Cobb”. I’ve got my new camera, a Canon 6D, with me and I’m learning on the fly. But with the stunning surrounds it’s nearly impossible to take a bad shot. We finally retreat for dinner at a local pub, where the locals are as again chipper, charming and friendly.

The next morning, Dad is raving about a place called Sidmouth in Devon, where he swears he visited a small nearby pirate smuggling cove. It sounds pretty cool to me but it takes some time before we work out that the cove in question is Ladram Bay, further along the Jurassic Coast. It’s indeed a pretty little spot with its shingle beach and red cliffs, but owing to time considerations we decide not to go for a swim. Again, it’s a regret, as the sun is shortly thereafter replaced by mist and cloud for the duration of the trip. Though wonderfully atmospheric, and not too cold, the new climate is not really conducive to ripping ones clothes off and taking a dip.

 

The misty atmosphere is heightened along much of the journey by the sheer overgrowth of many of the roads. I come from a country where open spaces are a dime a dozen, the roads broad and straight and the eyes easily affixed on infinity. This is not the case with England, as masses of lush vegetation crowd the narrow, twisting roads. Even the farmlands are often edged with hedges, or bushy overgrowth which block the views on either side of the road and give a heightened feeling of isolation. In the wooded areas, the trees grow so wildly that periodically, a vehicle with a massive curved blade is brought through to cut a clear path through the canopy. The result is a natural green tunnel through which the traffic wends. With the added inclusion of mist, driving these roads is a spectacular and surprising experience, one I’ve not encountered anywhere else outside the British Isles.

It’s with this suitably grim, electric weather that we round the perimeter of the Dartmoor National Park (another place I’ll have to visit in the future) and end up in Plymouth, a wonderfully grey place. Famous in history for being the origin of the Mayflower in 1620 (a ship containing folks who settled North America) and the place from which Sir Francis Drake, playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe, was notified of the arrival of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel in 1588.

We are served lunch in a pub by yet another friendly fella. Following this we head up onto the Hoe. For those unaccustomed to English English, a “hoe” is a park or green area. English is a remarkably versatile language and one whose colourful lyricism is not always fully adopted by us colonials in Australasia or North America. While Dad and I are delighted about our new vocabulary and the town itself the weather is drizzling and bleak. I’m pretty keen to stay the night, being a fan of interesting large cities and Plymouth being the only large city on our week-long adventure. Dad however, as always, is worried about putting some more miles on the clock before the end of the day. He assures me I’ll enjoy what is still to come and Plymouth becomes another place I’m just going to have to revisit properly. We hoist the sails and set out on a couple of car ferries and some overgrown roads to reach Looe, a small coastal town on the southern coast of Cornwall.

Though I have some trepidation about yet another small fishing village, it’s impossible to be disappointed. Looe is chock-full of stunning vistas no matter which direction the eye is trained. Another incredible tidal harbour is full of boats sitting on mossy rock-bottom, low tide, devoid of water. We chance upon a nice B&B right on the harbour, the owner seeming genuinely delighted and oddly bewildered at the arrival of two souls from a land so far, as if we’d been the first she’d met (and perhaps we were?). She gives us an upstairs apartment which has only one bedroom, which I give to Dad, while I take the futon in the loungeroom. I take the advantage of the view and the tides to set up my GoPro camera to get a timelapse of the tide coming in. An autobiography of Richard Branson on the bookshelf has the title page signed personally by the book’s illustrious subject, a personal message proclaiming “this book would have been impossible without your help”. When we ask the owner about its provenance, she looks puzzled, offering only that “Perhaps it belongs to my daughter or she knows something about it.” We resist the urge to steal the book.

We take a long walk through town and end up on the beach on the other side of the harbour, and we again get a delicious dinner in the local pub.

 

Later that night, we are awakened by a phone call from my brother in Australia. My grandfather, who has not been well, has had a stroke, and though still conscious, he can barely speak or move and with other various afflictions is not expected to survive much longer. I manage to call him in the hospital and tell him I love him. He’s my last living grandparent. The rest of the trip is filled with uncertainty – I am due to present at a scientific conference in Paris the following week, my mother is Italy, my father in England, and my sister is on a South Pacific cruise. Very few relatives are actually in Australia, and we begin to question whether we can or should cancel the trip and head home.

Don’t miss next week’s adventure, Part 2- Cornwall and the Cotswolds: Fishing Villages, Nostalgia, Pomp and Spectacular Scenery. You can also check out the video of this trip. If you’ve done a similar trip and have tips, or if you live in this fair part of the world, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.