Tremenheere

Yesterday was our first opportunity to look around Penzance. We were too early to check into our hotel, having just gotten off the overnight train, but they were happy to store our bags so we could explore unencumbered. We decided to head to the Tremenheere Sculpture Garden, a secluded ravine just out of town filled with artwork and exotic plants.

We caught a taxi just in front of our hotel and wound through the streets of town and then rural roads past hedgerows and farmland. St Michael's Mount was visible offshore, a tidal island topped by a medieval castle (much like the famous Mont-Saint-Michele in France).

The park was just opening when we arrived, and we might have been the first guests of the day. We wandered up and down the hilly terrain, checking out artworks like David Nash Ra's "Black Mound" (above).

The ravine is its own little microclimate, with a burbling brook at the base and lots of tropical or semi-tropical plants like bananas, palms and even gingers. I was astonished by some of what I saw growing there. I kept telling Dave, "We need to bring our avocado tree here!" Maybe they'd take it as a donation.

The kniphofias, which have been finished for weeks in our garden, were still blooming brightly.

More tropical foliage surrounding Sheila Williams' sculpture "Heliotrope."

There's a surreal oval structure called "Skyspace," a chamber with smooth, white walls and a cobbled floor, and an oculus in the ceiling allowing observation of passing clouds. (Or a blanket of clouds, in our case!)

Here's Lisa Wright's "Three Graces."

After winding along the pathways, boardwalks and steps of the sculpture garden, we descended to the restaurant where we had lunch -- Cornish mussels for me, dressed crab for Dave. Then we called our taxi and headed back into town, checked into our oceanfront hotel room and lay down for what we thought would be a brief nap.

It turned into a two-hour nap, which meant by the time we got up it was too late to go to Land's End, which had been our plan. (We could have done it if we had a car but we are subject to the vagaries of public transportation.) We may try to squeeze that in today.

This curious seagull landed on our windowsill and tapped gently at the glass with his beak for several minutes. Whoever had this room before us must have been feeding him. I was impressed by how mannerly he seemed and I wanted to give him a cracker but Dave was against it -- and it is true that if I put so much as a crumb out that window we'd probably have about 400 of his friends there in three seconds. They would have been smashing through the glass like Hitchcock.

Last night we went to a mediocre restaurant where dressed crab was on special. I thought about getting that with a side of rosemary-dusted chips (french fries), but then I noticed there was a dish called "crab-loaded fries" and it was cheaper. I asked the waitress, who was possibly still in high school, what she'd do, and she steered me toward the crab-loaded fries, which turned out to be dreadful.

"This is what happens when you ask a teenager what to order," I told Dave.