Ten nights in Cornwall

I was halfway up a single track lane on the edge of Exmoor when I found out what happens if you reverse a heavy van into a passing place that is not quite big enough. I tried to pull away and rolled backwards. Tried again and rolled backwards again. Got out to look, and the van was sitting on three wheels, one corner hanging over uneven ground with nothing under it, blocking the road entirely with a car waiting on one side and a queue building on the other.

Nobody decided anything

This was Cornwall in August, first time I had ever been, and I picked the fortnight Boardmasters was on, which is either the worst or the best decision depending on what you want out of a week in a van.

It was also planned before Quiet Route existed, and it was a big group. Those two facts did more to shape the week than anything about Cornwall did.

With a group you go with the flow of what other people want, which is right, and I would do it again. But it means nothing gets decided so much as arrived at. Nobody sat down and worked out how the nights should split, or which sites suited a van rather than a caravan with an awning, or how you get out of a remote spot in the morning. Those questions did not get answered badly. They did not get asked.

The road out

The first night was a spot on the edge of Exmoor that was not on Park4Night, which is why it was good. Three of us in the party, two vans already there when we arrived, one of ours towing a trailer, and the final left turn before the coordinates was interesting for him in a way it was not for the rest of us.

The morning was the problem. No signal at all. I have Starlink, so I got a route out, and my phone offered one and I took it, and it was tight, uphill, and getting tighter.

Then the car coming down. I reversed to a passing place because that is what you do, and the place was not sized for a van, and the ground was uneven, and I ended up on three wheels in the middle of the road. Genuine panic for about a minute. Then I calmed down enough to look at it properly and work out that if the front driver's side had anything solid under it I would have traction again, which is what levelling ramps are, even if that is not what they are for.

The driver of the van behind me, who had nothing to do with our group, got out and rocked the van back into the road while the tyres found the ramps. That got me out.

At the top of the hill I passed a car park with room for about fifteen cars. The driver who had come down had driven straight past it, and decided the sensible thing was to sit and watch a van try to reverse out of his way. That is beside the point, but I have not entirely let it go.

The point is that I planned nothing about that morning. I picked a remote overnight and gave no thought at all to what leaving it involved, and then let a phone with no local knowledge choose the road. If I am doing anything differently next time it is that: plot the route out of a remote spot as deliberately as the route in. It matters more in a big van than anyone tells you.

The eight o'clock rule

Newquay was the best of the week, and the car parks are the whole problem.

We found one big enough for the van and got there at half seven. An attendant came over to say campers could not park until eight. He had been ticketing people who had overnighted and told us plainly he would ticket us too if we stayed. So we drove round for half an hour, came back at eight, and it was fine. Short walk to the beach, breakfast at Seaspray on Fistral, which was worth the half hour on its own.

The eight o'clock thing is one car park in one town and it is not the useful part. The useful part is that rules like it exist all over and are almost never on the sign until you are already in the space, so the way to deal with them is to find out the night before rather than while you are sitting in a bay with a queue behind you.

The best day of the trip was the last one in Newquay, first day of Boardmasters (opens in a new tab), two families down on Fistral. The beach shacks were far better than I expected. If I had known, I would have set aside more money for them and less for other things.

What I would change

Fewer big holiday parks. The Newquay site was large, on the edge of town, and I am not naming it because the staff were unaccommodating enough that I left a review, which I do not usually do. But the wider point is not about that one site. The sites with the pools and the climbing walls and the entertainment are not why I camp. They were what the group needed and sometimes that is the answer, but I would push harder next time for smaller. Reading the reviews properly would have told me most of it.

Trevalgan Touring Park near St Ives was the other end of it. A family site as well, but a fraction of the size and much more personal. A neighbour across the way had been to the Masters at Augusta earlier that year and I lost the best part of an hour to that quite happily, and I suspect he had other plans for his morning. Bossiney was better again, fifteen pounds a night on a cliff with a portaloo and nothing else, which is fine when there is a toilet in the van.

And I would split the nights differently. Four in Newquay and four in St Ives is what we did. Five and three is what I would do, and I did not work that out until we had left.

Nine hours

We had no plan for the way home at all. Some of the group were stopping over somewhere. We were going to stop if something came up, and nothing did, so we drove.

There was a crash on the M5 and we routed round towards Bath, which was a lovely drive, and by the time we rejoined the motorway the crash had cleared and the traffic with it. An hour and a half gone. Gloucester services, which was good, and then straight home to the north west.

Nine hours, all in.

That is the number I keep turning over. Nine hours is Belgium. It is most of the Netherlands and a fair chunk of France. Cornwall earned it and I would go back, but you do not really notice how far away it is until you are doing the whole thing in one go with nothing planned and a crash in the middle. There is a lot of this coast worth going back for.

Which is roughly when it occurred to me that the trip had not gone wrong anywhere. It had just never been decided.