Day 2 of our Cornish Spectacular was not going well. The sleeping arrangements had not worked very well. We forgot to bring pillows for a start and my lilo deflated. The member of the team charged with the honour of inflating my lilo left the stopper out a bit and I had a slow puncture all night. Due to an oversight on my part the tent was only big enough fro 3 people to sleep in and not 3 lilos. The floor space was all lilo. The other problem was that neither of my children wished to sleep next to the other so i was forced to sleep in the middle. This gave me carte blanche to roll all over the sleeping space and, therefore my children. They did not take kindly to a snoring bulk of bone and blubber rolling around in the middle of the night. There is no place to hide in a 3 man tent. That was just the night.

Having extricated myself from my sleeping bag i had to try and fire up the spirit stove. The wind was blustering around again and made heating a problem. The beans and sausages were OK but once again boiling a kettle was a point of distinct failure and we all drank luke warm coffee for breakfast.

The forecast was living up to it's prediction. Windy and muggy. No sunshine. Before I had left the sunnier climes of Portsmouth I knew that this sort of weather was a possibility and lovely though Cornwall is, it is no place to be in bad weather. There were a number of options for indoor diversions. First on our list was the Eden Project

http://www.edenproject.com/index.php




It would take too much of my time to describe it fully and as there is a very good website about it I would recommend having a look.

As always I didn't really do my homework before we left and all I knew of the Project's location was that it was in an enormous clay pit in Cornwall. So having arrived in Cornwall all I had to do was find the very pit in which it was lurking. I reasoned though that since it was a very famous visitor attraction we wouldn't have to travel far before picking up some road signage that pointed the way.

As we tried to leave the campsite we found exactly that. And it was stuck the the front of a bus! A small mini bus had "EDEN PROJECT" emblazoned on it's destination panel. So that was it! Follow that bus! The Traffic entering Newquay that morning had other ideas. As the bus disappeared into the morning murk not one car would let me out to chase down that omnibus


I had to put my foot down once I was eventually let out and there then followed a cat and mouse journey across Cornwall as we traced the Eden bound bus. We charged (law full speed obviously!) to the next roundabout a couple of miles away and were just in time to see the bus snake round to the right. It took us more time than I imagined to catch a bus. So much so that I was about to turn around an hunt for a side road to some unhitherto seen village when the vehicle in question hove into view. No all we had to do was follow it. This was obviously not a problem so long as the bus kept moving. My quandary was what to do when it stopped to pick up passengers.

At the first stop it made in front of me I just sat and waited patiently. All was well. However after only a couple of miles quite a queue developed behind me and my bus until such a point where I felt duty bound to overtake as I was holding up traffic. The bus driver had been furiously waving me ahead at each stop so as to allow traffic to flow around him but I was having none of it. But you can only do so much and in the end I had to relent and pass the bus still clueless as to where our destination should be.

The road we had been led on turned out the be the road to St Austell. If not actually the capital of Cornwall, certainly one of it's important towns. It turned out the bus had by and large completed it's task in so far as I was concerned that it had one. There in the system of roundabouts that led through St Austell lay sign posts emblazoned with the words "Eden Project".

You can't see the thing from the car park at Eden Project. We had to climb aboard a bendy bus an wind our way down into the disused clay pit.

It was worht the effort.

the project itself covers the floor of what used to a be a pit for extracting china clay. There are 2 space age looking domes which are called biospheres. These are environment controlled areas corresponding to a Mediterranean and rain forest type climate respectively.

The entrance was on the opposite side of the pit and to get to the biospheres you had to pass through a lot of open air planting. I am not a botanist nor do i pretend to have any pretensions to botany so i have no idea what these were but we had to wind our way down them to access the bit we wanted to get to.

Me and the kids decided that we would do the Med first. My son was really only interested in the tropical bit so we saved the best till last.

What can I say? I am not a particularly plant person but the biosphere was interestingly laid out and quite interesting even for an old grouch like myself.

The rain forest was however worth the admission price in it's own right. Immediately you enter the dome the humidity hits you. The main concern was that we didn't miss a bit. The higher up we went the hotter it got (der!) so much so that the organisers had even laid on an air conditioned rest room lest you became overcome with the whole experience.

The biosphere hugs up against the wall of the quarry so that inside the forest appears to rise up the hillside. At the highest point there is a water feature that creates a series of waterfalls throughout the sphere allowing the project to create several small habitats. It really was quite a place. We even watched a small lizard crawl its way around. The little herbert had a trick of inflating a patch under it's chin. It just stuck out a disc of pink skin from his chin to his chest. I wonder if it was a threat warning or something more innocent?

We took our time in there. It is unlikely I will ever visit a real rain forest. Too many creepy crawlies, so this was as close as I was going to get.

We stopped for lunch at the eco boutiques. These food outlets made the claim that all the food was responsibly sourced/sustainable/vegeterian/cruelty free/kind to mother nature etc. Tasted like pasty and chips to me.

We left the biosphere reluctantly. There were other bits to see and i needed to find a hard ware store for some more Meths to cook with. With all the wind back at the campsite i had used quite a lot of fuel just to boil a kettle.

The rest of the site was whisked through as it held comparatively little interest for my two. We ended up in the gift shop and did our by spending some dosh there. Soon it was time to go and we joined the bendy bus back to the top of the quarry and our car.

It was a good trip. Even my hard to please son said he would come back to Cornwall just for the Eden Project, so there you are.

We found a Cornish version of B&Q and purchased our meths. I though buying 3 bottles would elicit some comment from the till but no.

Back at base i tried to cook again but found it difficult again. We pretty much gave up on the stove after that. The breeze was just too much for it. Even after we had arranged a wind break around it and all sorts.

we spent the evening in the amusement arcade and savoured some chips. The food was served by young people who were not English - No idea where they came from but my son appreciated the fact that only mainland Europeans know how to properly chill a can of coke.

So ended day 2

Weather permitting we would explore the beaches tomorrow