Dartmoor - B3212
Originally uploaded by Suzie Rozie.
Yesterday, Sunday, was a local touring day for us, and we drove across the Dartmoor National Forest (sometimes called the Dartmoor National Park, we see). It's hardly a forest at all, because at the topmost points there are no trees. Just a little bit of earth beneath you, it seems, and lots of sky.
It just so happened that it was the annual bike Dartmoor day, too, and more than 1,000 bikers took off from a nearby town and crossed the mountain. We must have seen a good half of them on the road!
With narrow roads (and we took a yellow primary road - B3212, not one of those white one-lane white roads, although we did get lost a couple times at the end and wound up on white roads - "wound up" being the operative phrase), cars going in two directions, and the road full of bikers, it made for some challenging driving (and passengering).
We had a beautiful day. We visited a huge monestery in Buckfast where we attended the last half of a Roman Catholic service.
We found out that the Park & Ride was open only Mon thru Friday for Plymouth and so we missed that town because we had previously decided not to drive into it - probably a good thing because the annual Trans-Atlantic sailing trip began there yesterday, and the city was probably packed with people.
We got lost on a few white roads (mostly one-lane) and thought our Nuvi was going to throw up its hands and announce "I give up!"
We wound up accidentally in Moretonhampstead where we stopped for ice cream. Twice, driving through town and making impossible 300-degree turns, Lauren ended up on the wrong side of the road and we stared, like deer caught in headlights, at the car facing us while I regained my composure sufficiently to (calmly?) shout "Wrong side! Wrong side!" to Lauren.
And then we got back to our condo, thoroughly relieved after the day's challenges, plopped into our over-stuffed chairs in the living room, stared blankly at the estuary until we recovered, and relaxed until supper.
There's no doubt that the driving is stressful for Lauren, and being a passenger isn't always a piece of cake, either. The medication I take for the neuropathy pains in my legs lessens my fear of heights, but there were places on Dartmoor that were so high and narrow and winding that I felt we were high on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, where I sat with my head beneath the dashboard and prayed while Lauren drove up and then back down the mountain, telling him to just ignore me for a while, looking over the ledge into nothingness.
I'm not only a passenger, either - I'm chief navigator, and Lauren relies on me to forecast and interpret the GPS's instructions, to watch the road to see that we're actually going to be taking the turn I see on the GPS, read the map, change our way points and destinations, and be pleasantly supportive while he does the tough job of trying to drive and steer through it all without clipping another car, a biker, a pedestrian, or whatever else happens to want to share those narrow roads with us.
And those bikers - how did they do that? That is a climb that would challenge anyone, and to pedal up that mountain? I have nothing but admiration for them. They have to be so disciplined to gain enough strength to bike that road. Wow!
A day like yesterday, though, is what makes a tour like this memorable. You see such beauty around you, you take a few risks, you learn about those around you - I'm so glad we decided to take this "one last tour" before we hung up our explorer's license. This is a great way to do it.
With this trip, we have the advantage of a more or less common language (English), our talking Garmin Nuvi GPS (with funny computerized speach), and lots of experience under our belts; so it's not as explorer-like as our earlier tours. Even so, it's a lot of fun and just what I was looking for when I proposed to Lauren that we go out on our own "one more time."
The world is a beautiful place. There's so much to see, and we've covered only a small part of it. But how fortunate we have been. We repeat with the psalmist, "our boundaries have been pleasant ones."
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