Castles, Gardens, Seals, Otters, Friends & Much More: Week 2 Of Our 5 Week International Trip

After finishing up our three days in Bath, England, it was time for us to head further southwest. This second week of our international trip was even busier than the first as we stayed in four different places over the course of six nights.

We managed to fit in a lot during that week, visiting a castle, gardens, had animal encounters, caught up with friends and much more – here’s a roundup of everything that we did.

Bath

Marshfield Farm Ice Cream

While walking through Bath, we’d passed a small Marshfield Farm Ice Cream shop. We were on our way to dinner at the time, so we stopped there on the way back for dessert but it had closed by that point.

That was disappointing as it looked like they had some delicious flavors, but all was not lost. Marshfield Farm Ice Cream’s main site is only about 20 minutes north of Bath and was only a short diversion from where we were heading when we left Bath, so we decided to stop there for a quick snack.

The farm has walking trails you can take to explore, but we didn’t have time for that – the priority was ice cream. They have hay bales set out to organize the line for ice cream which is a fun touch.

Trying to decide which flavor(s) to get is a nightmare as there are so many delicious-sounding ones. Strawberries in clotted cream. Blackcurrants in clotted cream. Caramel fudge in clotted cream. Salted caramel. Caramelized biscuit. Heavenly honeycomb. Raspberry ripple pavlova. Chocolate fudge brownie. Rhubarb and custard and so many more!

I settled on a scoop of strawberries in clotted cream and a scoop of raspberry ripple pavlova, while Shae ordered a scoop of chocoholic heaven and a scoop of chocolate fudge brownie. All four flavors were delicious and creamy, so it was definitely worth the stop. It turns out we got lucky as their ice cream parlor on the farm is now closed for the season, but we’d definitely be happy to stop by there again if we were nearby in the summer.

Devon

Nugget News

Shae has been following a pup on Instagram for a little while called Nugget. His owners are friends with someone else Shae knows in the UK and they were happy for us to stop by seeing as they’re based in Devon where we were passing through. Nugget helps his mum at the shop she works at – he even helped pupprove some toys for Truffles!

The Globe Inn

We’d booked an overnight stay nearby because we hadn’t been sure how late we were going to be out and about that day, so after saying hi to Nugget we drove a few miles away to the small village of Frogmore. It’s common for pubs in the UK to have bed and breakfast-style accommodations above them and so we booked a one night stay above the Globe Inn.

It was perfect for a one night stay – clean, comfortable and a private bathroom. We’d booked it via Hotels.com as we had a $96.79 credit to use towards a stay from their rewards program. The total cost for the night was $151.17, so our net cost was $54.38.

We decided to have dinner down in the pub’s restaurant. Shae and I both started with tiger prawns which were good but came overly drenched in oil (that’s the large puddle you can see on the plate).

The seafood theme continued for our entrées. Shae ordered the Salcombe hand-picked crab linguine which she enjoyed.

I ordered their seafood platter which came with whitebait, tempura tiger prawns, smoked salmon, scallops with ciabatta and fries – so much food, but really good.

I washed this down with a pint of Otter Ale from Otter Brewery in Devon which had the added benefit of coming in a cute pint glass.

Our stay included a full cooked breakfast the next morning before we set out for Cornwall, with lots of fun planned along the way.

Dartmoor National Park

Our first stop the next morning was Dartmoor National Park, a park that’s more than 350 square miles. For a bit of context for our US readers, that’s larger than Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah combined.

Dartmoor is the setting for the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles and it was easy to imagine how spooky it could seem there if fog were to roll in. We didn’t see the Hound, but we did see lots of other animals roaming around including sheep, goats and horses. They’re not wild animals in the sense that they’re owned by nearby farms, but they do get to wander pretty much wherever they like.

Despite being somewhat wild, they seemed nonplussed by people stopping by the side of the road and some were more than happy to get petted.

Dartmoor National Park is massive and with somewhere we had to be later that afternoon, we knew we didn’t have too much time to explore. After spending some time with the horses, we got back in our car and continued on to Hound Tor.

Hound Tor is a hill with granite rock on top. You can walk all around and even climb up the boulders, with some people practicing actual rock climbing rather than taking the easy way up the boulders.

Having climbed up to the top of Hound Tor, we headed back to our car and continued on to Merrivale which is the site of a Bronze Age prehistoric settlement.

Merrivale Prehistoric Settlement has some stone rows, standing stones, a stone circle and more. It’s thought the settlement dates back to circa 2500-1000 BC.

It was interesting watching the preservation efforts at the site. The guy in the photo below was using scissors to cut the grass around the base of each stone in this row. That’s presumably to ensure the ancient stone rows don’t get overgrown and aren’t damaged by heavier trimming equipment, but it looked like painstaking work.

Cream Tea At Two Bridges Hotel

It was just after 2pm by the time we finished wandering around Merrivale and we had somewhere to be later that afternoon, so that was the end of our exploration of Dartmoor National Park.

We did have just enough time to stop off for a quick bite to eat along the way though. Seeing as we were in Devon, we were keen on having a Devonshire cream tea and so while driving back through the park we stopped at Two Bridges Hotel to have that.

It was lovely weather that day which meant we chose to have our cream tea outside. Shae had taken the morning shift for driving that day and I was driving that afternoon, so she got a glass of prosecco seeing as she doesn’t like tea. The scones were homemade and the jam was from Hogs Bottom which is in Devon.

Otter Feeding At Buckfast Butterfly Farm & Dartmoor Otter Sanctuary

Feeling a little more well-nourished, we continued on to our next activity which Shae had been looking forward to for almost 2.5 years. Towards the beginning of the pandemic, Shae had read about an otter sanctuary in Devon that was trying to raise funds to help feed their otters seeing as COVID meant they’d had to close to visitors.

She’d asked if we could donate some money and when checking out their fundraising page I saw that they were offering an otter-feeding experience once they reopened if you donated a certain amount.

If you’ve followed our blog for more than two minutes you’ll know that Shae loooooooves animal experiences, so getting to feed otters is never something she’s say no to. I therefore donated enough for her to feed otters at some point in the future and we filed it away for when we next visited the UK.

Once we knew when we’d be down in Devon, Shae reached out to them to arrange the feeding experience, so that’s where we found ourselves after visiting Dartmoor. In addition to being an otter sanctuary they have a butterfly farm and so we walked through that first. It was a very quick walk though because it has to stay hot and humid in there.

Having escaped the sauna that was the butterfly area, we headed back outside to check out all the otters.

It was soon time for Shae to feed the otters and it turned out to be an even more fun experience than she’d been anticipating. She thought she might only get to throw a few pieces of fish for a couple of otters, but it lasted about 30 minutes and she got to feed loads of different otters as there were numerous enclosures.

She was initially a little creeped out though. Otters do eat fish and that’s some of the food Shae tossed them, but they also get dead chicks as a treat.

The first couple of otters were feeling a little shy and needed a little coaxing to come out and get their food.

The otters in the next enclosure were far more into it though and were as enthusiastic about Shae feeding them as she was feeding the otters.

Throughout the experience the sanctuary worker shared all kinds of information about the otters – here’s an almost five minute video from just part of the feeding experience. Shae had a wonderful time doing it and it was made even better knowing that we’d done our little bit in helping them stay in business in the early days of the pandemic.

Cornwall

St Mawes Hotel

Once we were finished at the Buckfast Butterfly Farm & Dartmoor Otter Sanctuary, we drove down to St Mawes in Cornwall. We’d booked a three night stay at the St Mawes Hotel using a mix of IHG free night certificates and points.

It’s a really small hotel as it only has seven rooms, so it was fun staying at such a boutique hotel seeing as our life of living in hotels means we normally stay in much larger chain hotels.

It’s a lovely property that’s right on the water. If we poked our head out of the bedroom window we could see the sea, but there were much better views from the Lower Deck bar and Upper Deck restaurant, particularly when sitting at one of the balcony tables of the Upper Deck restaurant.

Perhaps the most fun part of our stay is that the St Mawes Hotel has a Hidden Cinema. This is a 25 seater cinema hidden away through a door off the restaurant. We wanted to take advantage of this, so we watched Chicago in there on our final night and had the cinema to ourselves.

Shae and I had a really nice stay at the St Mawes Hotel. I wrote about it in greater detail at Frequent Miler, so check out that post for more details.

St Mawes

The town of St Mawes itself is such a cute and quaint seaside town.

There’s a bay where you can set out in a row boat or on paddle boards. You can go swimming at the beach if you can handle the cold water, there are lots of little stores, pubs and restaurants to explore and more.

A passenger ferry runs from St Mawes to Falmouth and back again from the morning until early evening if you’d like to explore further afield, but we didn’t have a chance to use that.

St Mawes Castle

One place we did visit was St Mawes Castle. It was less than a 10 minute walk from the hotel and was a fort constructed by Henry VIII in the 1540s.

The castle was in use as a fort until the early 1900s, so much later than a lot of other castles that you can visit in the UK.

Something that was nice to see is that like many other attractions in the UK, St Mawes Castle is pet-friendly and so we saw lots of dogs wandering the grounds.

Fish & Chips From Watch Out

Seeing as we were visiting a seaside town, we wanted to get fish and chips for dinner on our first night in St Mawes. Just down the road from our hotel was a restaurant called The Watch House. In addition to having a sit-down restaurant, they have a takeout on the side of their building called Watch Out which was a clever play on their restaurant name.

We both ordered their cod and chips. In hindsight, we probably could’ve shared one serving because they were enormous portions and so neither of us could eat all our dinner. The portion was much larger than the photo below makes it look!

King Harry Ferry

St Mawes is in a part of Cornwall surrounded by a lot of water, not only from the sea but rivers as well. That means there are a number of ferries, some of which carry foot passengers only, but some that can transport cars too.

One of the car ferries includes the King Harry Floating Bridge. This runs from one side of the River Fal to the other every 20 minutes, so it’s a quick journey across. This cuts a significant chunk of time off your journey because otherwise you’d have to divert much further up and around in order to avoid the river estuaries.

We had to use the King Harry Ferry in order to head even further southwest in Cornwall for a couple of places we wanted to visit one day. The journey across the river itself only takes 5-10 minutes and it seemed to get pulled by chains.

Cornish Seal Sanctuary

Otters weren’t the only animal we saw while down in the southwest. One of the reasons we picked Cornwall to visit during this trip is because Shae wanted to go to the Cornish Seal Sanctuary.

The sanctuary takes care of seals that are found around the coast of Cornwall that need some kind of medical attention, with the focus on getting them rehabilitated and returned to the wild as soon as it’s safe for them to leave.

The Lizard

After visiting the Cornish Seal Sanctuary we headed even further south to The Lizard. That’s not an animal, but a part of Cornwall that happens to be the most southerly part of the mainland UK.

There’s a path leading down to the beach, so Shae and I decided to wander down to check out the tide pools.

A quick tip if you want to park at the short stay parking lot at Lizard Point. The machine doesn’t take cards, so you’ll need the necessary coins to pay the charges. We didn’t have any coins on us, so we were going to try to find somewhere else to park. A very kind guy came over and gave us the £1.60 we needed to park there which we greatly appreciated.

Popleor Café

After wandering along the beach and over the tide pools for a while, we trekked back up the path and stopped at Polpeor Café for dinner. Polpeor Café lays claim to the title of Britain’s most southerly café and, as you might expect, has some spectacular views from the cliff top. We were even able to see some seals playing about in the water.

Shae ordered their steak sandwich for dinner, while I got their homemade crab cakes which were very tasty.

For dessert Shae got a scone with jam and clotted cream while I ordered their meringue with ice cream with berry compote.

After dinner we took a quick walk along the cliff top, then headed back to our car for the drive back to St Mawes.

Cornish Pasty No. 1

I couldn’t go all the way down to Cornwall and not have a Cornish pasty, so one lunchtime I got one from St Mawes Bakery across from our hotel. Unfortunately it was a very disappointing pasty – there was far too much crunchy pastry around the edge and the minimal amount of filling was mostly onions with only a little bit of steak.

I knew pasties could be much better than this though, so I resolved to find a better one before we left Cornwall.

Lost Gardens of Heligan

Our three nights in St Mawes came to an end quickly, so it was soon time to head back up to the southeast of England for the next part of our trip. Along the way we stopped at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall.

I remember hearing about the gardens as a kid, but couldn’t remember what the context of them was. It turns out that they were these elaborate gardens on the Heligan Estate that were around from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. The gardens were subsequently neglected but were restored and regained attention in the mid-1990s following a TV show that followed the restoration project.

Even though Shae and I didn’t really know what to expect of the gardens, it somehow didn’t meet our expectations! It wasn’t bad, but we didn’t find it overly interesting either. Shae’s highlight was finding all the different fairies they’d hidden around the grounds!

They did also have a beautiful flower display that we came across just before we left.

Cornish Pasty No. 2

One of my favorite parts of The Lost Gardens of Heligan was the food! This was our last stop before leaving Cornwall, so it was also my last chance to get a proper Cornish pasty.

I was in luck! Lobbs Farm Shop on site had steak pasties for sale, so I got one of those and it was everything I was hoping it would be. The perfect pastry-to-filling ratio, with lots of steak, potatoes and vegetables inside, just as it should be.

I couldn’t resist the homemade Scotch eggs that they were selling either, so I bought one of those too. Despite growing up in the UK, I don’t remember ever eating a homemade Scotch egg as I’d always gotten store-bought ones. This Scotch egg was the best one I’ve ever eaten as the sausage meat was even meatier than normal.

The Lost Gardens of Heligan also had lots of wild brambles which, in the UK in the summer, can only mean one thing – lots of blackberries! I therefore greatly enjoyed sampling these as we walked around the gardens because apparently a Cornish pasty and a giant Scotch egg wasn’t sufficient nourishment!

Southampton

Moxy Southampton

After leaving the gardens we continued up to Southampton where we stayed overnight at the Moxy which is one of Marriott’s brands. It was a nice place to stay for the night as the room was clean, cozy and comfortable. Shae and I enjoyed watching old episodes of QI, Would I Lie To You? and Mock The Week on Dave (Dave is a TV channel in the UK).

Nando’s

There are a few Nando’s restaurants in the US now, but we’re rarely near them and so we love to get at least one meal at Nando’s whenever we’re back in the UK as they’re far more prevalent there.

Their staple is peri-peri chicken which you can have in all kinds of ways. Shae ordered it as a chicken sandwich with fries, while I went for a butterfly chicken breast with sides of coleslaw and garlic bread. Our dinners didn’t disappoint. In fact, I’m not sure if the universe would ever allow you to have a bad meal at Nando’s.

Creams

I was full after dinner, but Shae can’t pass up ice cream, especially good chocolate ice cream like you can get from Creams.

SeaCity Museum – Titanic

We’d picked Southampton as an overnight stop because it meant we’d be able to visit all three cities during this trip that were important for the Titanic – Southampton, Liverpool and Belfast. All three have maritime museums with Titanic exhibits, so Shae was keen on visiting all three because a) she has a keen interest in the Titanic and b) it meant she’d be able to put together an online class about the Titanic for her students.

I had stuff I had to work on that morning, so Shae went to SeaCity Museum in Southampton while I got on with that.

She really enjoyed their Titanic exhibit (as much as you can “enjoy” that kind of thing), particularly because it shared so much about how the tragedy affected families in Southampton due to how many workers on the ship were from there.

One of the exhibits featured a map of Southampton with red dots representing each household that lost at least one family member when the Titanic sank. It’s not easy to see all the dots in the photo below, but there are lots of them.

Woking

The Cricketers In Horsell

After leaving Southampton, we drove up to Woking which is where I grew up. I have some good friends who live there, so we all met up for day, starting off at The Cricketers pub in Horsell for lunch and drinks.

They had a far more extensive menu than I was expecting, so it was hard to pick what to get. I wanted to order something quintessentially English though, so settled on bangers and mash.

Friends

We then headed back to one of their houses where we spent all afternoon, evening and into the night catching up. They frequently get to see each other, so it was lovely getting to catch up with them in person again as it had been about three years since I last had a chance to see them face-to-face.

It was such a fun time that it was a shame we were only able to spend that day with everyone. Shae and I stayed overnight at Becky and Adam’s which meant we were able to spend even more time with them before our trip continued the next day when we headed up to London.

This post is already more than 4,000 words long though, so our London shenanigans will have to wait for the next post where we’ll share what we did during the third week of this trip.

All Posts In This Series

• Hamilton, Stonehenge, Thermal Baths & More: Week 1 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
• Castles, Gardens, Seals, Otters, Friends & Much More: Week 2 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
• London, Paris & London Again: Week 3 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
• Liverpool & Belfast: Week 4 Of Our 5 Week International Trip
• Dublin, Ireland: The End Of Our 5 Week International Trip