Padstow

Looking happy in the old fishing village of Padstow

Let me quote from Lonely Planet:

“If anywhere symbolizes Cornwall’s increasingly chic credentials, it’s Padstow. This old fishing port has become the county’s most cosmopolitan corner thanks to the arrival of a bevy of celebrity chefs, and restaurants and boutiques now sit alongside pubs and pasty shops. …[I]t’s hard not to be charmed by the seaside setting.”

Not to be too negative but in our two-day stop we never saw anything remotely chic and we weren’t charmed a bit. And to make it worse, the little town was absolutely filled with tourists such that you couldn’t so much as go into a drug store because everything was so crowded. I find it amusing, though, that Mark managed to take some photos that make it all look attractive. Trust me, more illusion than reality!

The Camel Estuary

To be fair, much of the problem could have been that the weather was not great – overcast, periodic light rain. So not as beautiful as it would have been and maybe those hordes of tourists expected to be on the beach but instead were all crowded together on the town streets trying to get into the same drug store. And of course we’d just come from Hotel Endsleigh in Dartmoor, probably my favorite stop on the whole UK Explorer so I was bound to be let down.

And then there was Rock, the town across the Camel Estuary (the River Camel empties to the sea in Padstow) described in Lonely Planet as “an uberexclusive getaway.” Given that ferries run back and forth between Padstow and Rock every 15 or 20 minutes or so, it was not remotely exclusive, much less uberexclusive. We went over for lunch one day and it was … fine. It’s a mystery to me though why people would go out of their way to get here. As Mark asked rhetorically one day, “Have they ever seen Greece?”

The view from a coffee break in Rock

One of the primary attractions for Padstow and Rock is the dining scene. A couple of celebrity chefs have opened restaurants that were supposed to be really special. We ate at three of them and they ranged from pretty good to not so good; I thought even that part of the stop was over-hyped.

A sashimi appetizer in The Seafood Restaurant, the one genuinely good restaurant we found

Of course, there were some bright spots in the stop. The Camel Trail is an old railroad bed converted to a walking/running/biking trail heading inland out of Padstow that I enjoyed a great deal. We spent part of one morning sitting outside at a coffee shop reading with great views of the estuary and all the boats bobbing along. We had a nice water view from our room. All in all though neither of us understood the charm of Padstow or why there were SO MANY tourists there.

I guess all the stops can’t be perfect, right?