July 8, Tuesday

Since we visited the zoo yesterday, we were entitled to 50% off admission to the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth.  The kids really wanted to go, so we headed back to Plymouth after breakfast.

Adam, up early as usual, took his coffee and reading material outside to enjoy the clear blue skies.

The kitchen windows of our ancient cottage.

The garden gate.

Back in Plymouth, here is the aquarium — modern-looking building with all the green glass.

We got the stereotypical aquarium pictures:  kids with manta ray ….

… octopus …

… silhouettes against giant tank …

…. Holden’s favorite, a sea turtle ….

…. and we’re done.  When we came outside, the bridge was up for boats to pass, so we had to stand in the rain for 15 minutes waiting for our turn to cross.

Next up was Morwellham Quay Historic Port and Copper Mine.  It’s a preserved old copper and arsenic mining town.  My big take-away from this mine tour, after having toured a few coal mines in the past, is that mining for heavy metals was a better gig than mining for coal.

Adam:  It is now an open air Museum, with restored 19th century docks, quays, a ship, homes and shops and a copper mine.  At its peak in the 1850’s, Morewellham and the surrounding area contained the largest and richest copper deposits in the British Empire. The town boomed to support the mining.

Once even larger deposits were found in Montana, Australia and (especially) Chile, the town busted. They converted over to Arsenic mining by 1880 (to make Arsenic Trioxide; used in pesticides and some chemical processing) , but once artificial chemical replacements were invented around WWI, the entire place shut down.

One of the town houses.

A boat that would have been used to transport goods.

Josie in front of a waterwheel used for Manganese and Arsenic processing. She’s turned away because she’s in tears and trying to recover from some injustice her sibling imposed upon her.

The sweets shop.

Replica of the general store.

At the school, they had all the school-yard games set up.  The kids had a chance to play jumprope, hopscotch, skittles, and push a metal hoop.

Playing Skittles with 1860’s gear.

Josie still doesn’t have the hang of the metal hoop.  We saw these earlier on the vacation and they are still hard to manage.

Then the best thing ever as far as Josie was concerned:  BABY PIGS!

This old Clydesdale was a sweetheart.  One of the employees told us this horse was 23 years old.

Isabella went and found some fresh grass for him.

Getting ready to head into the George and Charlotte Copper mine. The mine was opened in the 1760s to chase after a particularly large deposit of copper. The vein ran almost vertically, sometimes only 1′ wide and sometimes 10′. They had to build a series of horizontal shafts, each 10-15′ deeper than the previous one. Men accessed the lower levels via tunnels with interconnecting wooden ladders. We got to take a train ride into the tunnel of one shaft and got a good tour of mining life during the 19th century.

Inside the copper mine.  We’ve been in several coal mines in the past, but never a metal mine.  It looked like mining for metal was a much more pleasant experience than mining for coal.  For one thing, it was a lot less dusty.  Also, the bedrock was so hard it was far less likely to collapse on the miners.  On the downside, it look a lot of blood, sweat and tears to gain even an inch.

Our tour guide.

Back in one of the houses:  example of typical family laundry facilities in the 1850s.

A typical potty.  The candle shelf is a nice, homey touch.  These folks were fancy.

At the Sweets Shoppe, Josie spent £1.40 of her hard-earned money on “pink pigs.”  She’s been making beds every day to earn spending cash, after paying for half of Holden’s new headphones wiped her out.  She’s really careful now about what she chooses to buy.  She’s discovered that you have to make a lot of beds to gain a paltry sum of cash.

Employee in old-timey outfit feeding stale cornbread to the ducks.

On the way back to our cottage, we passed this active prison in Princetown.  We went through their prison museum, but they didn’t allow photography and it was actually kind of lame.  Most of the buildings in this photo are of the active prison, where (of course) visitors are not allowed.

In the countryside on the way home, we passed by these rocks just out in the middle of the moors.  Of course we had to stop and climb them.

Adam:  We finished our drive back toward home by playing out in the Devon Moors. We had a nice afternoon to play, but it was quite windy. These areas have notoriously, chronically bad weather. Dartmoor inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to write “The Hounds of Baskerville” and it was on these moors that the 1994 Quidditch World Cup was played in Rowling’s Harry Potter books.

Me telling Holden to “get down!!”  The last thing we need is another injury.

No amount of Mama admonishments are going to keep this boy down.

Isabella in her element.  She runs and jumps her way through life.

It suddenly got really windy.  Adam’s hat flew off and Josie chased after it.  In this photo, she’s wearing it on her head.

Back at the house this evening, we scanned through every single TV channel three times and couldn’t find anything we wanted to watch.  The kids suggested watching one of the VCR tapes they found, because they have never seen a movie on a VCR before.  They chose Grease, so we all sat and watched it together.  It was “new to them” and at one point Josie said to me, “How do you know the words to all the songs?”  I told her “These songs are all incredibly famous” to which she replied, “How famous could they be?  I’ve never heard of them.”

July 9, Wednesday

This morning as we were getting into our car, I noticed this statue in the church’s front yard [photo below].  We’ve been here for three days, but not one of us saw it before.  I said, “There’s a Weeping Angel!”  (For my parents:  that is another Doctor Who reference.)

Isabella and Josie both got really excited.  Our conversation all the way to Exeter was about how creepy Weeping Angels are, and how freaked out we’d be if the angel has moved or is gone when we get back home this evening.  As we backed out of the driveway, Isabella was screaming, “Don’t look it in the eye!”

Adam:  We visited the ancient city of Exeter. It has served as a well-positioned trading town since at least 250 BC. Exeter’s heyday was in the 1500-1800’s, when it was at that time one of the largest cities in the world – always behind London, but not by very much. There’s not much of interest there today except the preservation of many of the middle-aged buildings. Much of the town, and many of the citizens, looked a little rough.

We went to a cafe called Tea on the Green, across the square from the cathedral, and had a late breakfast.  This building is only about 50 years younger than our cottage.

Once again, our GPS had hard time finding directions to our next destination.  It was another case of finding ourselves in a field with the GPS telling us to turn onto a tiny pedestrian path straight into the woods.  So, like so many times in the past month, we parked in the bushes and started walking.

Our goal was Okehampton Castle, a ruin that has been abandoned (and allegedly haunted) since 1538 when the owner ran afoul of King Henry VIII.  We got a little lost in the woods, but eventually found what we were looking for.

Adam:  Okehampton Castle was built in the 1070s by the family of Baldwin FitzGilbert as a reward for helping William I quell various Saxon uprisings in the area. It passed on to the de Courtenay family by marriage about 100 years later and remained in their hands until Henry VIII had Henry Courtenay (1st Marquess of Exeter) executed in the tower of London on trumped-up Catholic sympathizer charges (put to him by his rival, Thomas Cromwell – who was also later put to death for convincing Henry VIII to marry Anne of Cleves. Anne was supposed to be hot, but she wasn’t and that really pissed off the king.)

At any rate, the castle was in occasional use from the 1100s to about 1550 – mostly as a hunting lodge and occasional get-away.

The outer and inner wall faces look pretty well constructed, but the insides are all jumbled up.  It looks like they built two nice stone walls about 24 inches apart, then filled the middle with haphazard chunks and leftover mortar to help it stick together.

You’d think that something this big built almost entirely of stone would last forever, but the massive number of castles in ruins here suggests otherwise.  Without regular maintenance, even a castle won’t last more than a two or three hundred years.  The timber roofs rot away first, then the plants and animals move in.

Our big activity today was a visit to the Dragon Archery Centre.  It was fantastic and one of the highlights of our trip, especially for the kids.  They have all sorts of creatures to shoot once you’ve gone through the tutorial with regular bulls-eye targets.  They have themed ranges where you get to shoot at orcs, wolves, dinosaurs, armored Knights and, at the very end, a red dragon.  A staff member instructs every one individually so you learn proper technique.

First, the equipment.  Got to suit up!  Here is Holden being fitted with an arm guard.

Waiting for the instruction to begin.

Each person gets their own instructor.

We were Team 1 (“The Mayses”) and pictured below is Team 2 (“Spider Killers.”)

Isabella having “an epic time.”

The owner demonstrating a real long bow with 130-pound line (that is, it requires 130# of strength to pull the string back to your ear to shoot – the one Adam used that afternoon was 20# and mine was 16#).  His arrows could shoot accurately at 250 yards and hit the target at 115mph.  Here he is shooting at hay bales in the next field over.

One of the ranges.  Various enemy knight heads (black things on the wall), red targets, armored bad guys with weapons, flags, etc.  You get points depending on how difficult a target was to hit.  Each team tried to out-do the other.  We lost every round except for the last one.  The Spider Killers had a couple of teenage boys on their team who were quite good shots.

However, the big winner of the day was JOSIE!

It’s impossible to see in this photo because the target is so small, but there is a tiny gold circle on the body of this dragon.  The circle is about the diameter of a tennis ball.  The person to get closest to the gold circle wins, and if anyone manages to hit the circle directly, they get their name engraved on a brass plate in the front office and earn the title Dragonslayer.  Each person gets two shots.

No one in either team hit the gold circle, but Josie got both of her arrows the closest.  They were each only about 3 inches from the circle.

Proper technique and form ….

Holden did pretty well, too … but nobody got nearly as close as Josie did.

In this photo, you can barely see the gold circle …. it’s the little dot in the dragon’s armpit.

One last heavily cropped photo … the yellow circle is in the dragon’s front armpit.  If you know where to look, you can even see both of Josie’s blue-feathered arrows near it.