Where the heart is - Day 3

Look:

Isn´t it beautiful here? Yeah. I´d say so. Because it´s Cornwall. There´s hardly a more beautiful place on earth than this - at least to me.

And no matter how long the journey is, I was determined to come here.

I was thankful for in-seat-tv´s. That really helped on the 8 hour trip from London to Penzance. ´Cause...

 ...that´s where we are.

And it feels kind of surreal. For the few of you who don´t know this yet - Penzance is

• a) the town where I went to, as a kid, for four times, each summer in my teenage years between 14 and 17, 
• b) the town where I first met my husband and pretty much every other male person I ever came closish to, and
• c) the town where I situated the plot of my book, hence I spent the last three years marveling over google earth and replaying my memory. 

 And now I´m actually here. With all our loud, very alive children. And it feels so... so weird. Because nothing changed. I expected the town to look different, modernized, because that´s what you´d think, after 16 years, right? But it shockingly looks exactly like it did, maybe a tad more rotten, which makes it even more charming in my eyes. And my feet still find every never-forgotten way.

 There some new shops, but many are still the same I used to spend my pocket money in when I was young.

We showed our kids the rocks behing Jubilee-Pool, and they liked that a lot. I used to spend long evenings out there, playing the guitar and having romantic teenager-feelings. Ronja liked to jump and scream, and Miro liked to pick shells off the rocks.

 Most amazing is probably the smell. I inhale here - I didn´t expect that - and it still smells like... the past. It smells like tar and salt and seagulls and fish, and pastis and chips and something sweet, and pubs and waste and neopren and sunlotion. I had completely forgotten about the smell, but it´s so real. 

And I still remember this pub so vividly...

 ...now I´m taking my kids there to use the public rest room :)
  
We took a taxi cab to our caravan park, because we had too much luggage for a 7 mile walk - we´re situated 7 miles out of Penzance, on the way to St. Just. It´s, well, the very, very far Southwest of Britain.

We´re staying in a small caravan, which is quite cozy.

And as soon as we arrived, went for a walk through the patchwork of fields that covers the hills here, met a farmer and had a nice chat with him, got our feet dirty and cuddled his cows.

It was really nice of him allowing us to tresspass his fields, even giving us a weather-forecast.

This part of Cornwall, I hadn´t even consciously realized as a kid. I had been so fixated on the towns, (and boys), that I really overlooked the pure natural beauty. Well, I suppose I didn´t completely overlook it - you´d have to be really strange not to see it, but... it was different, when I was young.
So there we are now. Maybe tomorrow, we´ll go walking along the coast.

 

But for tonight, I´ll sleep, and maybe meditate a little, over my last good-night cigarette, while everyone´s asleep. See you.