We finally escaped the BnB owner’s tales of farm management, lack of gate closing, dead sheep and escapee cows, over breakfast, and got going at 9am. After two appalling nights’ sleep in a row (last night the result of the world’s most uncomfortable mattresses) we really didn’t need the main road first thing. So, to avoid dodging cars, we took a short cut that took forever to fight our way through the undergrowth and we ended up just joining the road again. It was cold, grey and just flinging wet mist around. This is the only view we had for hours.

Occasionally there were pretty things that would be great to photograph in daylight and a realisation of how many spiders there are in gorse bushes.

Then we made it onto the moors proper, in the fog and this was our view for hours.

So to liven things up and pass the time, we tried to sink Mark in a bog, but somehow miraculously he survived. So we moved on to discussing the potential for VR based technology to replace physical travel and a discussion on a headline today that AI has the potential to cause human extinction within the next two years, and how it might happen.

We then photographed some rocks and a Dartmoor pony who appeared as if by magic out of the mist, surprisingly well camouflaged against the grass.

These are apparently iconic for Dartmoor, as is Drake’s Leat:

This is a waterway built under the supervision of Francis Drake to bring water into Plymouth from Dartmoor.

At times, we could have been staring at an English country manor garden. Despite being as wet as Loch Ness, it’s definitely not as wild as the Highlands here.

By now, we were a tad disenchanted by the weather and the amount of water it had flung at our glasses and camera lenses with monotonous regularity. So after a bit more water and woodland, we found a brilliant rural pub in the excellently named Hoo Meavy to have a snack for lunch.

The pub had homemade food, and local ciders, including multiple types of scrumpy. We are properly in Devon  and it’s lovely to see regional food and drink after all the banal menus we’ve seen. We did not try the “Slack Ma Girdle” scrumpy though as we still had to stay upright for another 15km for the most important part of the day.

This was seeing our youngest son and going to his work place, a week before he starts studying chemistry in Plymouth university. I can’t wait to spend our rest day with him tomorrow. 

Distance – felt like forever, actually 37.2km. Don’t want to move a muscle tomorrow.