My first day of holiday leave started with doing house chores, hoovering, ironing… generally ensuring the house was nice and tidy for Alan’s home alone week. By mid-morning I was ready to start my holiday and Alan drove me down to Gloucestershire, my interim stopping point before heading down to Cornwall.

Before sending him back to the cats, we went to the cinema to see the new Terminator movie and then met up with my parents for a meal in Après. A little before 7pm I waved Alan goodbye for the next eight nights.

During the last week we have had a bit of a heatwave, and today the weather was breaking and cooling down this resulted in the night at my parent’s house being broken by an electrical storm that lasted well over an hour. Mum knew I would be awake and watching it, likewise it was no surprise to me when she joined me just after 1am watching the distant heat lightening put on an awesome display of cloud to cloud fork lightning.

4am arrived in a blink of an eye (or in a flash of lightning) and I was once again awake getting ready for our 5:45 departure. The weather was dry and overcast for the majority of the drive down to Cornwall. We stopped along the way for breakfast and arrived in Portmellon at 10:15. We had a few hours to kill before the cottage would be ready for us at 14:30 so we people watched here for a while...

…and then headed to Mevagissey (our home village for the next seven nights). Today is the last day of the Mevagissey Feast Week, the village has celebrated the ‘Feast of St Peter’ here since 1754. The week has involved a flower festival, fishing boat race, fish festival, teddy bears picnic, crab catching contest, water polo, pavement artist competition, sculling race and lots of live music. Today, the last day of the weeklong festival, would include a flora dance, fete, carnival and firework display.

The picturesque harbour, decorated with flags and lanterns, was alive with locals and visitors. We sat on one of the many benches along the harbour wall and watched the goings on before Mum & I explored a tiny low tide exposed beach.

14:00 arrived and we watched the children get ready for the flora dance while we headed back up the hill to our cottage. We had bought some pasties, scones & Cornish clotted cream in the village and we ate them looking out over the harbour.

At 19:00 we popped back down the hill to watch the Carnival, a collection of the young and the not so young dressed to impress. It was a little disorganised and being little Mum & me got pushed around by the over-tall people, but I managed to get myself back to the front again to take a few pictures.

We finished our first day in Cornwall with watching a wonderful fireworks display over Mevagissey Harbour...

Back to the cottage, we unpacked the goodies and got ourselves ready for an afternoon of coastal hiking. However, before then we would need to refuel again so we ate at the Wheel House Restaurant in the village. An unremarkable meal which resulted in disappointment that the mussels didn’t come with crusty bread (instead two thin slices of bread) and that the fishcakes were more like potato cakes with a hint of fish. The disappointment was so deep I decided to do a TripAdvisor review while we were still in the restaurant.

By the time we were ready to set off for our walk, the weather had significantly improved and it was now dry and sunny again. Highlights along the way included exploring the rocks on one of the secluded beaches, Mum spotting a seal and the bug wildlife we spotted on the trail.

We stopped briefly at The Lizard wireless it was the home and centre of Marconi’s experiments in the early 20th century. Originally set up to supply a ship-to-shore radio service for ships passing Lizard Point, in 1901 Marconi set the distance record for a wireless signal transmission of 186 miles, sent from the Isle of Wight. On 18 April 1910 the station became the first coast station to receive an SOS call from the ship the 'Minnehaha'.

Once back at Lizard Village we stopped for a drink and toasted tea cake before making the near two hour drive back to the cottage again, where I prepared salad and fish for dinner, yum.

At Dad’s request I did not get up at my usual crack of dawn time and waited in my loft room until 7:00 before coming down for my shower. A little after 9.00 we were all ready to commence our coastal exploration, this time in a southerly direction from Mevagissey.

For the walker / hiker there are many great ocean side trails to follow, today we would be doing part of the Portmellon & Bodrugan's Leap trail. We started from the cottage and walked the 1 mile to Portmellon and headed towards Bodrugan’s Leap.

This section of the coastal path is named after Sir Henry Trenowith of Bodrugan who invaded Sir Richard Edgcumbe’s estate here in the 1480’s (during the period of the war of the roses). Sir Richard sought revenge against Sir Henry and in his escape, it is said, he outwitted his pursuers by leaping onto his horse and riding down onto the beach and straight onto a waiting ship to France. The Tudor version of this story is that he leapt to his death!

Whatever the truth he leapt from a stunning part of the Cornish coastline which today was made all the more dramatic by its ever changing weather. The forecast was for a windy and occasional rainy day, but we struck lucky again, and other than a couple of very quick light showers it was another lovely day (which Mum & I noticed the sun always seemed to come out when we were doing an uphill section!)

We slowly, enjoying the views and stopping many times to spot birds and insects, made our way to Gorran Haven a pretty little village with its own tiny harbour. We rewarded ourselves with an ice-cream and had a quick look at the village as we made our way back to the trail.

Back through Portmellon and to the cottage around 15:30. We had a bit of a rest, before heading into Mevagissey village for dinner. I wanted to eat at the Salamander Restaurant (the number 1 restaurant in the area) but it was fully booked, instead they slotted us in for a reservation for the next night and we bought haddock & chips, returning to the cottage to scoff them along with a portion of curry sauce & a portion of gravy yum yum!

18:00 soon came around and we made our way to the restaurant where we were welcomed by the owner Hazel. Her husband Mark's cooking surpassed our expectations and the food more than lived up to the restaurant’s TripAdvisor reputation and at only £24 each for three courses it was excellent value too!

A nice early start today, we were up, out the cottage by 7:00 and on our way towards Penzance. Along the way we stopped briefly at the RSPB’s Hayle Estuary hide to see what birds were hanging out. High tide is apparently the best time to visit and also during September to March, but we still managed to see a couple of curlews in the distance, a little egret, a heron, a few Canadian geese and a young goldfinch.

The clear skies overnight had made the morning a little nippy, so we only stopped briefly before continuing on towards Penzance. We stopped to refuel the car and Dad at the Penzance Morrison’s and then continued on to Sennen.

Mum & Dad had once seen a basking shark here close to the beach so we thought we would visit on the off chance it was a hot spot for them. No shark this time, but we did really enjoy the coastal walk from Sennen Cove to Land’s End.

Along the route is the MV RMS Mulheim ship wreck, it was a German cargo ship that was wrecked on 22 March 2003 (only four years after it was launched from where it was built in Romania). On a voyage from Cork to Lubeck in Germany, carrying 2,200 tonnes of scrap plastic, she ran aground around 5:00 in the morning in moderate visibility and fog patches. The chief officer caught his trousers in the lever of his chair and when he tried to get up it caused him to fall and knock himself unconscious. When he came to it was too late to turn the ship from heading towards the shoreline. All crew were safely rescued.

A Stonechat showed Mum & I the way to Maen Cliff Castle, an Iron Age promontory fort, dating around 500BC. It is one of only two fortified sites in Cornwall where early Iron Age pottery has been found (from the period 400BC to 400AD). The legend is that the giant Myen Du once lived here.

Onwards to Land’s End where the site has been commercialised to an extreme, with King Arthur and Shaun the Sheep experiences to be had. We avoided these, grabbed some fudge, photos of the Land’s End marker post (which you can pay to have a message that everyone else is then stuck with as their memories too (hope the two-year old appreciates its birthday will be marked in everyone’s pictures until some other sucker pays to change it). In addition the marker post has been moved from the first and last house and been stuck in front of the ‘attractions’ I can only assume it is because people were too lazy to walk the extra couple hundred yards to its original site).

Once back at the car we drove back to Penzance and parked near the harbour, I checked out TripAdvisor for where was best to have lunch and we happened to be walking by the number 3 best choice out of 160 in the Penzance area, the Old Lifeboat House Bistro. The building, the oldest lifeboat house in Cornwall, dates back to 1884 and was closed as a lifeboat station in 1917. Mum & Dad enjoyed a steak burger and I had a very generous portion of delicious crab salad.

Next onto the Buccaneer shell shop, a bit of a tradition for us as a family, I have bought many useless trinkets here over the years. Great memories, but this time I escaped with no purchases (my years of retraining had finally paid off).

Alan had asked me to locate and bring back a curry pasty, but after trawling through all the pasty shops in Penzance, not one was to be found! Mission aborted, we went rock pooling in front of Saint Michael’s Mount.

Smurf story – you may be wondering why there is a picture of a sunbathing smurf - this little guy has been under my care since smurfs were given away as promotional goodies by National Garages in the 1970s. This was my second one, the original with green shorts, was left on a rock on a beach the same summer I was given him. I cried so much my Dad got me this one and I have treasured him ever since. I decided to take the risk of allowing him the pleasure of sunbathing and this time he was safely placed back into my bag again!

All the rock pooling had made us hungry again so we stopped for an afternoon tea in the Godolphin Hotel which overlooks the St Michael’s Mount causeway, now clear from the receding tide. A final stroll along the beach ended a perfect day before our leisurely drive back to Mevagissey.