Saltram House

Well, my boots and Stephen's hiking trainers were still wet so no heavy duty hiking for us today. We decided to revisit Saltram House, one of the first National Trust houses we'd been to after becoming members all those years ago. I think the first house was Castle Drogo where we were dragooned into joining by some very fearsom ladies of the NT.

Anyway, entry was by timed ticket, but although there were lots of cars in the car park, there didn't seem to be many people in the house. The weather was again fine and sunny so many people were going in order to picnic in the grounds I think.

Wandered round the house then had a light bite to eat. Didn't fancy any of the main courses so I figured that iced-tea and cake would do the trick. I loved the cake, but surely if I have it instead of a main course - doesn't that make it healthy?

We headed off to find the Fairy Trail geocache. It was along a pretty gently walk down through the shade of lovely trees. Arrived at the destination and hung back so Stephen could find it which he did. This one was a big traditional geocache. Traditional seems to mean hidden under a log and contained in an old ammunition box. There were lots of goodies in it - little christmas-cracker type toys. We hadn't brought anything with us to swap and there wasn't really anything we wanted. More for little kids. Still, Stephen was really delighted to have found his first geocache.

We'd loaded a few others in and wandered around the grounds looking for them. One, the Plym view, was clearly outside the grounds so we abandoned that one. The Goblin Trail was in the grounds but would have involved retracing out steps and we didn't fancy doing the same walk twice.

Brilliant day - nice to just wander around beautiful places with no particular goal or feeling of pressure.