Bournmouth, Poole, Lyme Regis & Chard

Thursday morning Len was feeling much better and we re-traced the walk I did the previous evening along the beach promenade to the central park and shops in the sunshine after another hot night. It was much quieter with hardly anyone on the beach and with only one beach hut being used out of the many we passed, the others all still being closed up and padlocked. The squirrels in the park were not afraid of us at all and would come up really close, almost begging for nuts.

Shades of blue at Poole harbour!

We then drove on to Poole which has a large harbour with many inlets, boats, canoes and the odd person crabbing. Crowds of people about, both on the harbour side and the beach enjoying the continuing warm sunshine. We enjoyed people watching while we had a coffee in one of the beach cafes before driving on to Lyme Regis through Bridport where there was quite a traffic delay. It took us about 35 minutes to travel 3 miles but the rest of the day wasn't quite so bad.

Trying to spot a space for 2 on Lyme Regis beach!

Lyme Regis is a quaint seaside village, very small compared with Bournemouth and mostly covered with pebbles although there was a good, very crowded, sandy area close to where everyone was swimming. We had a lie down on the large pebbles which aren't as uncomfortable as they look and can give quite a macro-acupressure effect on those sore parts on your back if you wiggle in the right direction! We wished we had taken our togs with us even though we had no towels.

From there we headed a little inland to Chard where we had booked to stay at the Watermead B&B for the night. David and Trudy were very hospitable providing home-made biscuits and tea in the garden when we arrived, Dave introducing us to George their 4 month old chocolate labrador at the same time. David and Trudy are doing a 13 day campervan trip in NZ in October after going to their nephew's wedding in Melbourne so that was a good talking point and, who knows, we might meet up with them in a camp ground somewhere as we will still be in Debussy then! We had dinner at Wetherspoons, a chain pub serving food a bit like Cobb & Co, and which was a short walk away at the bottom of the village. It was busy,busy and we met up with a few of the locals who shared our table, one of them being the window cleaner for the B&B!