Day 10: St Agnes to Land's End

We have made it! At 2.35pm GMT on Friday 11th April 2008, we arrived at Land's End, 600 miles from our starting point in Berwick-upon-Tweed. We travelled on 37 buses, through fifteen counties. It would have cost £122.70 if we had had to pay. We shall donate this amount to charity.

We started out from the delightful village of St Agnes, an old tin mining community. Many chimneys attached to the mines still stand. Apparently they were used to burn off the arsenic.
Lovely pub meal last night and delightful landlady who gave me a tour of the beaches before we left. Our bus last night was full of chattering school children coming home from Truro. Today there was a complete mixture of passengers. There was a lively discussion between the driver and the rest of the passengers about the bus's change of ownership . The wonderfully named Truronian company was bought by First Bus last week but its livery has not yet changed.

We enjoyed todays crossword by Paul. It was challenging until we realised it was about our second favourite subject - trains. The key clues were LATE TRAIN. The key answers were LEAVES ON THE LINE, SIGNAL FAILURE and THE WRONG SORT OF SNOW!

We have almost given up studying timetables. The network of buses in Cornwall is so good that we get to an 'interchange' and wait for a bus we want to arrive which it generally does within minutes. We were met at Penzance by the BBC from Plymouth. A cameraman came on the bus and his colleague drove separately to Land's End to interview us. He took a picture of us in front of the famous sign post with Nil's camera but had the impertinence to criticise the 'white out' in the background because it was such a sunny day. Manju hopes the photograph comes out as she did not know how the change the settings. We thought that would be the end of the media interest in us but I have to do a live interview on Radio Sheffield tomorrow morning, Manju's doing the same for Radio Manchester on Monday morning and we are both going to Manchester for an interview for North West Tonight on that evening.

Our readers will all be pleased to know that we are still very good friends. There was one tense moment when I nearly finished the crossword before Manju got up one morning but we have solved that problem. Either I buy two papers or I don't start the crossword until she is fully functioning. We also had an argument at someone's house about quantum physics. I think the less said about that the better. We really have giggled our way through England and enjoyed every moment. We are going to do a bit of sightseeing tomorrow in St Ives, and on Sunday we return home by train.

This is our last posting to this blog. We have learned many things from this experience - what a blog is, how to edit comments (which is why there were none for the first few days), how to persuade our hosts to give us access to their computers, how to use an iMac, how to charge up our mobiles in bus station offices, how to operate a camcorder, how to resist some of the media expectations and how to travel light.

These bad girls have not gone everywhere ..... yet.