Our fifth day was one of wall-to-wall sunshine, and for the first time we realised that packing sun lotion wasn’t a mistake!

We really missed Otto’s constant chatter and enthusiasms, but actually had opportunity to talk to one another! However, finally having to carry our rucksacks, our pace was much slower with regular pauses to just admire the view (my excuse to rest!).

The other interruption to our walk was that a race along the coast path was taking place – a sixteen mile circular run with 1000 metres of climbing! As the path is largely narrow, we did a fair amount of climbing up banks to avoid runners!

After a pub lunch in Trevaunance Cove, we continued to our overnight destination, a pub in Perranporth – where I was delighted to find a bath to soak in!

A Backward Glance

An eerie quiet accompanied our walk out of Porthtowan but the sun did its best to cheer us up a bit. We were carrying our bags now and the hills seemed steeper than ever until we were having to dodge out of the way of human missiles coming at us from behind. There were hundreds of them, each smiling disingenuously as they passed, like we were a couple of confused elderly escapees from the local care centre who’d wandered innocently onto their race course. At the end of this section of our walk we met a fellow grumpy old lady who was about to meet her husband, Martin, who’d let her out for the day. Martin wasn’t able to join her as he was recovering from cancer treatment. We chatted too briefly, it was like sharing just half a page of each others life blog together. People are so interesting, especially the grumpy ones travelling scarier journeys and along paths we hope to avoid. We bid them farewell and went our separate ways, theirs down to a car park, ours up into the hills. The walking took us by a cove where herring gulls were nesting on a steep grassy edge. It was like a small village of them all at a respectable distance from one another. Herring gulls are monogamous and mate for life, about twenty years, so there may be a sense of companionship we share with them. It was a relatively short trek but we were pleased to hit the edge of Perranporth and the Seiner Inn and get the bags off our backs and our backs onto beds.