Exmouth

Mark enjoying canapés and a martini before a fancy dinner at Lympstone Manor, with the Exe Estuary in the distance

For this three-night stop we stayed at Lympstone Manor, an old country manor with more modern rooms attached. The hotel is out in the country about a mile-and-a-quarter from Exmouth, a little port town at the mouth of the Exe River. The attraction was the hotel itself, a place Mark thought would be pretty great. And while it had its upsides, there were a couple problems. The biggest was that most of the rooms (including ours) were in a relatively modern structure designed such that the rooms had … no windows! The doors had windows that opened a couple of inches, but that was it for fresh air. Oh, and there was no air conditioning. As a result no matter how delightfully cool it was at night, the room was way too warm. And too dark, even on a bright sunny day. Strange.

And then there’s the issue that the hotel advertises a “heated pool.” My guess is that it was ever-so-modestly heated; the water was cold, but would have been way colder in this climate without some added heat. But we’ll just say gently that the hotel’s version of “heated pool” differed dramatically from Mark’s expectation. Neither of us went in.

Mark along a bike path

There was one part about the hotel that I loved. They had a few bicycles available that you could just check out at no cost, so we did a beautiful 11-mile ride into the city of Exeter mostly on a dedicated bike path along the Exe Estuary and then the Exe River. And not only did we enjoy the bike ride but we loved the little town of Exeter – a beautiful cathedral, lovely restaurants; it was quite the treat.

The Exeter Cathedral has the longest uninterrupted medieval stone vaulted ceiling in the world. Pretty impressive!

There’s this weird thing about Exeter. We didn’t plan on coming here at all; it was just fortuitous that the hotel had the bikes and we were close enough for an energetic but doable ride. But we’d already stopped in Exeter on the way between Bath and Dartmoor. Mark had figured out that the most efficient way to get to Dartmoor was to take the train to Exeter and then hire a driver to take us an hour to Dartmoor. Then we took the train to Exeter again on the way to Lympstone Manor, getting out and hiring a car for the last 30 minutes to the hotel. And when we left the Lympstone Manor, the best way to our next stop – Winchester – was to take a taxi back to Exeter and catch a train from there. So we spent a lot of time in a city that we never intended to visit at all!

At any rate, the bike ride and visit to Exeter was a highlight. The only bad part of the ride was that on the way back we were following signs to Topsham – a little town we biked through on the way up to Exeter – “via ferry.” The ride was beautiful and I was loving it until we got to the ferry … and it wasn’t running. I don’t know if it was because of the low tide or because it was a long weekend or what, but there was no ferry. And since that was the last crossing before the Exe River dumped into the sea, we had to go back 10 or 15 minutes. It seems like they would warn you with a sign saying “via ferry, if it’s running…” or something like that. But still, I thought it was a great ride.

Me, discovering that the signs pointing to the Topsham ferry were a lie!

We had some good food on the stop. The hotel has a Michelin-starred restaurant that we ate at one night that was pretty special. And one night we took a taxi into Exmouth and ate at a really good seafood restaurant. It was a bit of a strange night, though, insofar as we were walking around town a bit just to see what was there and walked through a somewhat down-scale residential neighborhood that was between the town center and our restaurant right on the coast. There was a lot of police activity across the street from us in front of a small house and we thought we heard a bystander – presumably a neighbor – use the word “murder.” We just kept walking.

Part of the delight for us over this portion of the trip has been the transportation. We’ve had to spend money hiring drivers to get to some of the out-of-the-way places, but then we don’t have car rental and gas and parking and all that to deal with. And sometimes you learn a thing or two from the drivers.

We chatted a bit, for instance, with the driver who took us from St. Mawes to St. Austell, where we would catch the train on to Exeter. He asked us where we’d been in the region and we talked about Padstow. Now, I didn’t want to be too negative about a place that maybe he loves even though it was hands down the least interesting stop on this trip. I needn’t have worried. “Oh, people hate Padstow,” he said. “They call it Pad-sty!” He even told us about a couple he drove once who had worked in hotels and restaurants all over England. When he asked what was the worst place they’d worked they immediately responded that it was Padstow. So it wasn’t just us who didn’t like it!

Exmouth was the 23rd of our 26 stops on this Explorer, so we’re definitely winding things down now.