Exe marks the spot.

Sunday 1st May 2016 - Aylesbeare, near Exeter.

A bit of a greyer day, so still on the cool side.  I must comment on the CL owners in more detail.  As I said before they seem to be running a very large small holding, they have chickens, a large poly tunnel which has very little in it.  The whole site looks like there are several projects going on all at the same time but very few actually getting finished.  There are logs, fencing, piles of earth, a range of garden furniture and statues randomly placed including gargoyles fixed to posts.  My description probably doesn't sound too pleasant but it combines to be a lovely quirky ramshackle.  The husband and wife are extremely friendly and very obliging.  They gave us half a dozen eggs for nothing and insist that we come down to the house and have a look around the small holding.  The husband seems a little more eccentric than his wife.  He roams around wearing a boiler suit randomly working on his many projects.  He calls me 'dude' and I made the mistake of telling him I was a retired police officer and he started saluting when we left the site.  This morning he was less than tactful when he tried to describe us as cyclists by calling us 'pedalophiles', this is not a word to use in polite company!!  Despite all this its nice to have people of character and he is a friendly chap after all.

Our cycling trip today was to Exeter itself.  

The cathedral looks grand but they were trying to charge £7.50 to get in!  We didn't bother.  We believe that the church at Ottery St Mary is modelled on it anyway and we have seen that.

Janice is partial to a cheese scone from M&S so we went in for a warm in the cafe.

The castle of Exeter is called Rougemont Castle and it is apparently the oldest standing castle in the country. 

Their isn't an awful lot of the castle left but we had a walk around the wall and nearby park.  It is also a location where witches were executed.

The quayside was a nice area and we cycled down the river Exe before heading back to the site.

On the way back we found a small shopping outlet. We had promised ourselves some new fleece jumpers and found some nice bargains.  Mine was a North Face polartec and Janice's was a Jack Wolfskin technopile fleece.  I made the mistake of looking at the labels to find out the science and the claims behind the products.  Wow, Janice can now have 'advanced performance', she can breathe whilst rock climbing, white water rafting and snow boarding despite having never done any of these activities previously.  My polartec has versatile thermoregulation with lofted fibres but I can't take a paracetamol when I wear it because the fleece is 'pill resistant'.  The things they tell us to make us buy a fleece!

On the bird front, we saw a pied wagtail or was it a wagged pietail?  It made me think of a joke about two men in prison, they asked each other what crime they had committed.  The first said he was caught robbing a wagon and the second said he had been 'wagging his robin'!  This is what my family call a 'Richard joke'.