Cornwall 2022, day 1!
Nov. 18th, 2022 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torkellFor a few months now I've been meaning to visit Craig again - eventually we actually (virtually) sat down and compared dates, and this weekend came up as the only sane one. So I trundled down to Cornwall for the weekend this afternoon.
I very nearly took the train but the rail unions are striking over the weekend and while my journey theoretically isn't affected, quite frankly I don't trust them at the moment. Plus driving is cheaper (off-peak open return: £73.80, 350 miles of fuel at 46.8 mpg and £1.80 per litre: £51), faster (fastest train: 4h27m, fastest driving: 3h23m), more convenient (driving is door-to-door and I can pick my departure time), and more reliable, and while I can accept some of those as a tradeoff for being able to sit back and relax the problem is the train consistently fails at all of the above.
The drive there wasn't that bad - there were no big queues, just lots of little ones and bits of oddly slow traffic (and one spot where someone had put something agricultural into a ditch!) and even with all that my drive down was only delayed by 25 minutes which is less than the delay the last time I went by train. As before the MiTo just eats the miles up. I was mildly amused on a couple of steep downhill stretches on the A38 to see cars in front brake for them - my approach to downhill is to drop into a lower gear and let engine braking carry me down at a constant speed with my feet off the pedals. I wonder how that driving skill will apply to electric cars - on one hand you don't have gears to descend through, but on the other hand they can provide a lot of braking effort through regen into the battery.
Anyway, once at Craig's we then ended up coming up with ideas for the weekend. Unfortunately this was precisely the wrong weekend for most nearby National Trust and English Heritage places as they've either closed for Christmas, or closed to prepare for Christmas opening. Plus due to a heap of scheduling conflicts Saturday would be taken up by unexpected shenanigans, but that's a tale for tomorrow's post!
I very nearly took the train but the rail unions are striking over the weekend and while my journey theoretically isn't affected, quite frankly I don't trust them at the moment. Plus driving is cheaper (off-peak open return: £73.80, 350 miles of fuel at 46.8 mpg and £1.80 per litre: £51), faster (fastest train: 4h27m, fastest driving: 3h23m), more convenient (driving is door-to-door and I can pick my departure time), and more reliable, and while I can accept some of those as a tradeoff for being able to sit back and relax the problem is the train consistently fails at all of the above.
The drive there wasn't that bad - there were no big queues, just lots of little ones and bits of oddly slow traffic (and one spot where someone had put something agricultural into a ditch!) and even with all that my drive down was only delayed by 25 minutes which is less than the delay the last time I went by train. As before the MiTo just eats the miles up. I was mildly amused on a couple of steep downhill stretches on the A38 to see cars in front brake for them - my approach to downhill is to drop into a lower gear and let engine braking carry me down at a constant speed with my feet off the pedals. I wonder how that driving skill will apply to electric cars - on one hand you don't have gears to descend through, but on the other hand they can provide a lot of braking effort through regen into the battery.
Anyway, once at Craig's we then ended up coming up with ideas for the weekend. Unfortunately this was precisely the wrong weekend for most nearby National Trust and English Heritage places as they've either closed for Christmas, or closed to prepare for Christmas opening. Plus due to a heap of scheduling conflicts Saturday would be taken up by unexpected shenanigans, but that's a tale for tomorrow's post!
