Newquay; Sunday, 04 October, 2020

I managed to get a reasonable nights sleep, despite the howls of wind and the hammering of rain on the windows, though I did think it might make the day a complete write-off.

After breakfast I headed back up to my room and changed into waterproofs before heading out into a very light drizzle, but a howling gale. Whilst I was pleased that I wasn’t going to get wet it did make it take quite a bit longer than I was expecting to walk the half mile or so down to the aquarium as I was battling headwind the entire time – at places struggling to even stay on my feet, let along make progress.

I eventually made it to the aquarium and spent quite a bit of time wandering around, long enough that I stopped in the on site café for lunch.

By the time I headed out it looked like I’d managed to miss another heafty shower as I wandered back through town and then on down towards the zoo. I had a ticket booked for a bit later in the day, but a quick check online had shown that virtually none of the pre-booked slots had filled up so I thought I’d chance my arm and it turned out they were only to happy to let me in early – possibly as I was the only customer booked into the last slot and it meant the ticket office could close up early.

It turned out that there were very few other guests in the zoo, and in all the time that I was in there I think I saw only four other visitors, plus a couple of keepers.

Wandering round the zoo was also an experience in dodging the hefty short showers that kept coming across – timing leaving each covered area so that I got as little of a soaking as possible, and by the time I had seen the whole of the zoo I was getting quite good at it.

It would have been a 20 minute slog uphill in the pouring rain back to the hotel, so in the end I decided to wait the 10 minutes for the bus and caught that back the three stops. I then headed back into the hotel to get changed out of the wet weather gear, had some dinner and then waited for my booked taxi back to the airport.

The taxi drove back over to the airport through an absolute storm with howling winds and lashing rain. The weather was so bad that I did think at one point that the inbound plane might not be able to land, but 15 minutes before it was due there was the sound of a jet landing, and the familiar BA livery came into view.

The crew managed to turn the plane around quite quickly, which meant that boarding managed to coincide with a small window in the weather where it was only lightly drizzling, rather than pouring down – so we were able to walk out to the plane and up the boarding ramp in the dry. The flight was, thankfully, considerably smoother than the journey down and with the wind pushing us part of the way we landed around a half hour early back at Heathrow.

Weather

Heavy Rain Heavy Rain
AM PM
Warm (10-20C, 50-68F)
12ºC/54ºF