Last year Sarah and Rob visited the Eden Project and loved it. They reckoned we would too. However it's a 300 mile journey to get there so we decided to incorporate it into a bigger trip rather than a one off visit.
Our plan - a journey break in Cheddar, three nights in Bude, two in a site close to the Eden centre, three nights in Lyme Regis to appreciate the geology. With Europe on hold until my medical shenanigans are resolved heading to the West Country seemed a much better prospect than watching the rain come down at home.
According to the website 'Travel Supermarket' the most popular area for summer staycations in the UK is Devon and Cornwall. In theory, if you head there in early September, just after the school holidays, you should should be spoilt for choice - the two counties have a total of 450 campsites . However if you are travelling by motorhome the topography makes it tricky. Away from trunk roads most routes are winding and narrow and somewhat nerve-wracking in a moho. Furthermore, many sites are situated down farm tracks or sunken lanes.
Our criteria - accessible, scenic, comfortable and inexpensive reduced the choice from hundreds to a handful.
That being said the two Cornish sites we chose were excellent - Upper Lynstone Caravan Park on the western outskirts of Bude and Eden Valley Holiday Park situated just off the A390, halfway between St. Blazey and Lostwithiel. Admittedly the access to the latter place was down a single lane donkey track. Luckily the place is only 700m off the main road, so the driver's dicky fit was short lived.
We liked Bude. The town is a twenty minute walk from the campsite down a minor road. Luckily there's a pavement the whole way. Anywhere in Cornwall that is beside the sea and next to the coast path is hardly going to be untouched by mass tourism. The raw material of Bude's main industry is definitely visitors, but the place does not seem to be overwhelmed by them to the point where it feels like a theme park rather than a functioning town.
Anyway we were not here to see the sights, Gill needed a phone shop. Recently she changed provider from Three to a smaller provider calked 'Popit'. It's based in Doncaster and judging by its excruciatingly amateur web presence its design feels a bit like someone's failed A Level Computer Studies final project. Why choose it? Because it is one of the few UK providers that has retained European roaming as part the standard offer - 100gbts for £25 per month - it's a good deal. However, only if it works, and so far Gill's experience has been less than ideal.
For reasons beyond the ken of Popit's helpline elves, when Gill activated the PAC code to transfer her old number the process wiped her phone's four digit security code and fingerprint recognition feature. Effectively she was locked out of her phone. After a few of hours of sporadic online assistance from Popit's helpline and many attempts to revive the phone by turning it on and off we were left with the nuclear option - return the device to factory settings. Effectively this wiped the memory.
Finally Gill had a functioning phone with her old number installed but every single app now needed to be re-installed. It's only when faced with this situation that you truly appreciate just how dependent we have become on the little oblong box of tricks that we keep within arm's reach day and night - banking, navigation, news, socialising, trip planning, home energy management, shopping, listening to music, camera, a fitness tracker, recipes, world weather, restaurant reviews, gossip, addictive trivia, our shared Google photos archive (11,000+ pics and rising), our blog... It struck me in both our travelling life and home life we now exist actually and virtually simultaneously almost without noticing.
When in 2011 Amber Case delivered her famous TED talk 'We are all Cyborgs now' her assertion that global interconnectivity would transform us into a 'new species of digital human' all seemed a tad Sci-fi. It came as no surprise that she had dubbed herself a 'cyber anthropologist' and lived in California. Maybe Homo-Cyborgs in Palo Alto but not anytime soon in Buxton, I mused to myself. A dozen years later I am not so sure. Gill's week of intermittent connectivity was really quite disruptive and upsetting. We have no landline now, so without a mobile the only way anyone can contact us is to write a letter, like something out of an eighteenth century epistolary novel.
Thankfully our access to planet Zog was fully restored before we left for our trip to the West Country. It stayed that way until just past Taunton. Gill's mobile signal vanished. My phone was fine. So Gill' s issue was either her phone or an outage on the network that Popit piggybacks on - 'Three'. Checking online it did seem that Three was having a few issues in the West Country, but when the problem with Gill's phone persisted for hours all the way from Taunton to Bude, and still would not connect the following day we conclude it was more likely that the problem was her phone not the network signal.
We wandered down to Bude looking for a phone shop still open late on a Saturday afternoon. There were two. The first one was closed, it was now almost 4.30pm, we headed for 'Foneshop' (very literal!) more in hope than expectation. It was open and, contrary to all our previous encounters in mobile phone shops, the guy who ran it was lovely, friendly, helpful and chatty. After 15 minutes or so of fiddling with the settings on Gill's phone he removed the SIM card and put it into a different phone. The shop phone displayed the exact same dysfunctionality as Gill's - clearly the problem was with the SIM card supplied by Popit just a week previously. They would have to send a new one. For now friendly phone shop guy supplied Gill with a PASYG SIM for £10 and we bought a bit of credit from the convenience store around the corner. Connectivity restored, deep joy all around.
We took a slow stroll back to the campsite, deciding on the way that Bude in particular and Cornwall in general was great. No wonder the place gets inundated with visitors, it's not just the picturesque towns and villages, beautiful landscape and spectacular coastline that attracts people in droves, all the locals we have met have been lovely, welcoming, easygoing, helpful and straightforward. In other words not very English at all. It feels like another country once you cross the Tamar; culturally as different from the rest of England as Wales or Scotland.
We should have been having a great time; sadly whatever lurgy that had assailed me in Cheddar showed no sign of clearing up. I felt very fatigued and had to rest from time to time and we walked up the long hill. I felt as if I had aged ten years in the past two days.
Gill found a local place on Google maps with rave reviews for serving up great breakfasts and brunches that was open on Sundays. The 'Electric Bakery' is on the outskirts of Bude in an industrial area adjacent to a canal.
There looked to be a nice walk to it down a nearby lane then along the tow path.It was lovely, I have a bit of a thing about estuarial wetlands, I find them profoundly peaceful.
We reached an area of small workshops and businesses but no sign of the bakery. It took a bit of wandering about looking quite perplexed while staring balefully at our phones before we happened upon it. The bakery certainly wasn't where Google maps claimed it was.
Today I felt ok at first but found once we arrived at the place I had no appetite at all. We gave up on brunch, bought some bread instead, then headed back to the campsite, taking a more direct route through Bude town centre and up the big hill. The same malarkey as yesterday, I had to keep stopping for a rest every five minutes or so. When we got back to the van I decided I had better heed the advice given to me after the biopsy - if you feel unwell seek advice as post operative infections, if untreated, can escalate into a medical emergency. However, it was now mid afternoon on a Sunday. Phone the NHS 111 helpline was my only option. I managed to get some anti-biotics in the end, but it took thirty stressful hours to achieve this apparently simple thing.
After ringing out for twenty minutes or so someone at NHS 111 answered. She eventually got around to asking me what was wrong but first went through a virtual triage checklist to ascertain that I was well enough to last the phone call and not about to expire on the spot. When eventually I was allowed to explain my problem I had to repeat everything two or three times because the connection was dodgy and the signal wafted about like a feather in the breeze.
Communication was further hampered by the woman's accent. She was incredibly posh sounding. With 'R.P.' seemingly honed in Rodean she should have been easy to understand. However her enunciation was very 'Sloaney', lazily running one word into another, each phrase trailing off into a mumble, as if getting from the one end of a sentence to another required an herculean effort that she seemed reluctant to make. Still, we got somewhere eventually. She advised me that she could arrange for a doctor from Cornwall's 'out of hours' service to ring me later.
Gill decided to take a walk along the nearby coast path. I could understand why, life in the van, or at least its soundtrack, was beginning to resemble some script from Holby City that ended up in the slush pile. She Whatsapped me some photos of the spectacular geology as she went along.
We need to come back here when I am fully fit, I promised myself.
After an hour or so a doctor rang back. I explained my situation yet again. He took some notes and promised to get back to me later. It was about eightish when he rang back, offering me an appointment at the out patients dept of the local community hospital about three miles away in an hour's time. This was a tricky proposition as it was now twilight and it would mean packing everything away and we may have had difficulty getting back onto the campsite afterwards. I asked if he could arrange for me to see a GP next morning, but he explained there is no tie-up between GP practices and the Cornwall out of hours service. His best suggestion was that I headed to one of the county's 'walk-in' treatment centres. The nearest was in Bodmin, about 30 miles away. It was kind of on the way to our next campsite near Lostwithiel so that's what we decided to do.
By our standards we made a prompt start - off before 10.30am. It was only as we headed Bodmin-wards that the practical challenges of what we were doing dawned on us. Namely how do you park a 7m vehicle in a hospital car park. Recent experience had taught us that patient and visitors parking facilities at NHS hospitals are always over-subscribed and overpriced. Gill found a small retail park about a ten minute walk from the hospital. We headed there and luckily there was a pull through space. Illegally parked across two bays with a two hour time limit, it was the best we could manage; we headed for the hospital with fingers crossed.
On arrival I explained my predicament to the urgent care centre receptionist. She asked me to take a seat and someone would talk to me shortly. Twenty minutes later I was ushered into a side room to talk to a triage nurse. I repeated what I told the receptionist and the nurse took my temperature, blood pressure and pulse Your temperature is normal but your pulse and blood pressure is a little raised, she informed me.
I returned to the waiting room and awaited to be summoned by the chief nurse who inhabited a treatment room beyond a set of NHS bilious green double doors, protected by a security code. People came and went. After twenty five minutes I was summoned. The senior nurse was professional and efficient but somewhat lacking in empathy. While I explained my situation, he repeated what the triage nurse had done twenty minutes earlier checking my blood pressure, temperature and pulse yet again He then made a number of observations. Firstly he pointed out that the doctor should never have referred me here in the first place as it was a minor injuries unit not a walk-in treatment centre. Secondly he wondered why I had not attended the outpatients appointment yesterday evening, observing that I had been staying on a campsite not a stalag. Finally, he advised in future I would be better advised to phone my home GP practice rather than use NHS 111. This made no sense as I had just handed him a urine sample so he could check for an infection. How you might do that while chatting to your GP on the phone?
I was returned the waiting room to await the result. Almost two hours had elapsed since we arrived. Gill decided to return to the van to ward off prowling traffic wardens. About twenty minutes later I was back in to see the nurse. He confirmed my sample showed signs of infection and speculated that I may have developed prostatitis, but was unable to make a formal diagnosis or prescribe antibiotics. For that I would need to drive to the walk-in treatment centre at the community hospital at Redruth and Camborne about 35 miles west of Bodmin. He emailed his notes and my test results to them. This was beginning to become very frustrating, Redruth and Camborne was in the opposite direction to the campsite we were booked into for tonight.
Cornwall's road network is not well set up to deal with the volume of traffic it gets during holiday periods. In particular thr A30 running west is not a dual carriageway and becomes slow and nose- to-tail at peak times. By September things should have eased up. They hadn't. The stretch between Bodmin and Redruth is one big construction site as finally the road is being upgraded. A series of traffic light controlled contraflows resulted in tailbacks and a journey which should have taken 45 minutes anded up almost twice that.
It was a little before 3pm. when we arrived at the hospital. Thankfully it had a wide perimeter road without yellow lines where we could park the van. Same malarkey as before, a rambling explanation at reception, vital signs checked by a triage nurse for the third time today.
A notice in the waiting room explained that cases were coded according to their urgency and the most serious dealt with first. I must have been the least urgent. So I had plenty time to observe a parade of the sick and injured as they disappeared into the treatment room before me. I became expert in the unfortunate things that befall surfers - fell off board in shallow water and cricked neck, collided with rock and fractured arm, stung badly by a weaver fish.
Not every fellow patient was wearing a wet suit. There was a worried looking mother with a sick baby and fractious toddler in tow. An elderly woman accompanied a by younger one (daughter, carer?). She put in an Oscar winning performance of being an elderly woman in abject pain timing her whimpering and moaning precisely to coincide with anyone passing by in a uniform. It worked, she was whisked away quickly. There were lacerated tweenies needing to be stitched back together, two guys in Hi Viz, sitting next to their white hard hats; one of them clutched his upper arm. They exchanged comments occasionally in what may have been Bulgarian.
Finally, at about 4.15pm. it was my turn to see the doctor. He was brilliant. Amenable, attentive and willing to listen. He gave me a thorough examination - a doctor wielding a stethoscope - that hasn't happened to me in years! My blood pressure and heart rate were raised, but given the vicissitudes of the past few hours that was hardly surprising. After a blood test he concluded that in all likelihood I was suffering from acute prostatitis and he prescribed a two week course of antibiotics to fix the problem.
It was now well after five, luckily the Tesco Extra store about three miles away in Camborne had a pharmacy open until 7pm. By 6.15pm. I had the magic pills, we set the sat-nav for Eden Valley Holiday Park - 37 miles it reckoned. Gill phoned the campsite to inform them of our late arrival; so long as you are here before ten it will be fine, they advised. We skirted Truro, passing close enough to the centre to glimpse its pleasingly squat cathedral, then around the outskirts of St. Austell and through the middle of St. Blazey. All places we had no intention of visiting on this trip. It was dusk by the time we arrived at the campsite, having negotiated the final unexpected obstacle of the day, a tricky single track sunken lane from the main road to the site, about 1.2kms I guessed. The owners were friendly and sympathetic, in the half light the place felt beautifully tranquil.
Had today been the most difficult and stressful in all of our travels? Maybe not. When Gill slipped on mud and broke her leg at a remote Agriturismo in southeast Sicily, ending up in the tender care of Noto hospital's accident and emergency department, that was probably more challenging. We did have help and support then from Giusi and Roberto, the Agriturismo's owners. Today it was Pete and Gill pitched against the dysfunctional NHS. I like to think, after an evenly matched bout, we won on points.
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