The Eden Project

 The Eden Project Binomes.

 The indoor canopy walk.

 The Rainforest Binome viewed from above.

 The platform we viewed from.

The potent nature god, Dionysus, here depicted as a bull.

 Gorran Haven.

The harbour. 

The very steep, narrow road we came in on.

Thursday, August 31^st.

John and I had a great full English breakfast prepared by our hostess, Marilyn, and had a chat with her husband, Edgar, about farming in Cornwall. Unfortunately he was too busy to give us a guided tour of the farm. He told us that his family had been there for 60 years and that they were originally a dairy farm, but now have beef cattle, sheep and farm wheat, barley and hay. He also told us about the problems the industry had had in the past with hoof and mouth disease and mad cow.

Then we left and drove to the Eden Project. This is a massive complex designed and created by Tim Smit. It is a educational, environmental, exhibition consisting of large golfball looking domes, called binomes. One is the rainforest binome and the other is the Mediterranean binome, which features the areas of the world with similar climates: the Mediterranean, southern California, South Western Australia, and South Africa. We wandered around the Rainforest Binome, looking at all the plant exhibits before climbing up the indoor canopy walk and to the actual roof of the dome where we got a bird's eye view of the complex. Then we explored the Mediterranean Binome where I enjoyed the grass trees I had seen in Australia and had a baobab smoothie made from the seeds of the baobab tree.

We also visited the Space section where we read about the different attributes of all the planets and saw a display for each as well as some history of the space program and the space station. It was a great place to be today, because we were indoors and it rained hard off and on.

We stayed for about 4 hours before leaving to go to the small seaside village of Gorran Haven. This is where John went for holiday visits with his family when he was a kid. Unfortunately, it started raining hard just after we got there. We went in a small cafe and had a crab bap (crab cake burger) and a drink and watched the rain pour down the small steep streets to the sea. It let up long enough for us to take a short walk around before leaving for our accommodation for the night. This time we are at a horse farm near the town of St. Austell. We met our hostess, Karen and checked into the lovely house where we have our own rooms and a sitting room too! Then we both had (separately) baths. Later we went to a local 16^th century pub called the Polgooth Inn (which means goose pond in Cornish), for a couple of pints and dinner. We both had a three fish (hake, cod and monkfish) dinner with potatoes and fennel. Then we went back to the farm where we Skyped my dad and then Denise.