The Wayfaring Path

You’ll be pleased to learn the temps have dropped to a far more civilised mid-20s, so there should be a bit less whining about weather this week. Since last week’s episode I had a pretty quiet week, partly cos I was tired, partly cos I was broke, and partly cos I wanted to!

On Monday we realised that Toast the kitten had doubled in length in the time we’d lived with her, and she was starting to have longer periods of being settled and non-bonkers. I thought that she was behaving a bit better – less plant-eating, less leg-climbing, less brother-bothering, but she immediately a liar out of me whenever I said that out loud. I was feeling sad to be nearly saying goodbye to the pair of them, they had really become part of my daily life.

Tuesday was another at-home day, and then on Weds I went to the main Plymouth museum and art gallery, The Box. It’s a nice museum, with my favourite bit being the old ship figureheads hanging from the ceiling. Not for the first time on this trip I thought “you can tell they don’t have earthquakes here”! Some fab bits of old fings, some interesting audio-visuals, and fairly adequate coffee. All up a good last wee trip to Plymouth town.

Thursday was another trip to Tavistock, and we felt just as positive about the place as when we last visited. We did some window-shopping, wandered around, had a cheap pub meal, and went to a folk music gig at the lovely old Guildhall. We left early in order to catch our 8:45pm bus, but even though the bus arrived and had a driver, for some reason Stagecoach decided to cancel it, so we had to wait an hour for the next (and last!) one. Grr. Home VERY late – after 11pm – so took Pluto out for a quick walk and had a quick play and cuddle with the kitty before bed.

Friday was the beginning of the end of our Plymouth sit, I was really aware that it was the last or nearly the last time I was doing things with the animals, and I started to think that maybe I’m a bit too sentimental and soft for pet-sitting. Am I going to get sad and droopy whenever I move on? But I suppose being sentimental and soft is something that I’d want in someone looking after Lulu, so I guess that’s a good thing.

Regan, Pluto and I walked to the post office. There’s a LOT of post offices here, and people seem to get way more mail than at home, probably all bills of course, but it’s interesting how much a part of the local fabric post offices and posties still are. Not so many dedicated post offices, they are usually in a newsagents (kind of like a dairy in NZ); and so I found myself spending a good 20 minutes in the local shop/post office, packing up some stuff to send home and enjoying the banter.

Every time we move on I like to send a package home – nothing flash, just stuff I’m not using, small souvenirs, the odd stone I’ve picked up. So I was fiddling about with packing tape and trying to memorise all the contents of the package before I closed it up as I had to tell the man behind the counter so he could type it in to the computer. My memory is hopeless, and I forgot half of it, so hopefully customs don’t get too mad at me. It was the kind of shop where they knew the customers’ names, and it was lovely to feel a small part of it, although I’m sure nobody else felt at all kindly towards me as it took so long for me to list off the contents that the queue behind me was out the door.

Eventually I made it back out to Regan and Ploots and we walked home. Regan popped over the road to put a bag of poop (Pluto’s not Regan’s) in a bin, and I tried to keep walking towards home but as soon as Regan went out of sight Pluto refused to move. “Nobody left behind” is Pluto’s motto (except perhaps the kitten, I’m pretty sure he’d happily leave her anywhere!).

On Saturday morning we were getting ready to leave, feeling organised and doing well. Regan took Pluto out for a walk and then I got a message saying Ploots was refusing to leave the cemetery. Regan was getting a bit worried so I walked up there and when he saw me Pluto came running towards me, dragging Regan along behind him, and so we got him home. I played with Toast, got a bit weepy, and said goodbye. Pluto’s uncle came to pick him up for the day as his family weren’t due home till late that night. We locked up, said goodbye, and dragged our bags to the bus.

We had a good train trip – it’s an amazing train, going from the south west all the way up to Glasgow. It’s the train I’ll be taking to York, to Edinburgh, to Berwick-upon-Tweed, but those trips are all in the future! It was the first day of school holidays and the train was busy the whole way, with people getting off and on and the accents getting increasingly more interesting as we went further north. It was uneventful, which is the best kind of travel – except that we very nearly missed it!

I’m always super early to basically everything involving transport so we got there over an hour before departure and hung out in the cafe. For some reason I then had a brain fart and thought the train was leaving at 12:37pm not 12:27pm, so we were getting to the platform a good ten minutes before “departure”, sauntering up to the guard to ask where our carriage was and he was like well it’s up there, but you need to just get on this one cos we are leaving RIGHT NOW! So that was lucky. The train gods were smiling on us 🙂

We had one night in an Airbnb just off London Road, which is a busy strip with so many great restaurants from what feels like every country in the world. It’s noisy and intense and reminded me of being in actual London in my 20s. We had a great Vietnamese meal and then went back to our odd little accommodation. It had the steepest stairs I’ve ever seen and was difficult and dangerous to get the heavy bags up there. It was in a converted attic with a hilariously angled floor, happily with our own bedroom and kitchenette, but with a pretty average bed. It was noisy and had all the things I don’t like about central cities – revving engines, food smells, street lights… and then we heard banging and hammering on a door down below. Neither of us was going to walk down two flights of stairs at 2am to see what was going on, so it wasn’t until the morning we found out some other guests were locked out so they broke the glass on the door to get in. Needless to say we were pretty happy to get the heck out of there.

We walked into the CBD and got a coffee at Costa (the only thing open at 8am on a Sunday) and then found a wonderful little cafe called Cafe Tucci. Amazing smell of warm pastries and coffee, friendly people, great breakfast – things were looking up! We slowly walked towards the bus, stopping to peer down at the celebrity stars set into the pavement, and a kind man stopped and asked us what we had dropped – I guess we looked like we were trying to find a lost earring!

On the bus to our next sit, we were very happy to leave the inner city behind us and see the roads widen and become tree-lined. It’s lovely here, with woodland paths all around, just perfect for dog-walking! We spent time with our hosts and the dogs – Harland and Sanders – and had a really nice dinner at a cheap and cheerful local Thai restaurant. It started absolutely bucketing down during dinner and I saw a crack of pink lightening!

Our hosts left this morning so we’ve had our first day getting to know the dogs’ routines and personalities. I’ll explain more about them next week, but suffice to say they are complete characters, absolute units, and have the ability to sleep 23 hours a day. And I thought cats were lazy!