Top photo: Field of poppies we walked by in Porlock.
Next: The 17th century wall of our cottage.
Next: One of the numerous tree tunnels we drove through.
Next: From our front living room window.
Next: From our bathroom window.
Bottom photo: From the cliff at Lynton.
West Somerset was beautiful and peaceful.
We stayed in a 17th century barn conversion cottage near Wheddon Cross in the Exmoor National Park.
We went to Dunster but couldn't go into the castle with Benny. No big deal. We had a lovely lunch in the back garden of a nice cafe. I had eggs, ham, and chips, and Mrs Newport had a cream tea. We also bought 5 original oil paintings from an artist who paints in the same shop he sells his work at. It's on the High street. David Deakins. Only uses a palette knife and a roller. Creates these lovely unique impressions. We're quite proud of them. We shook his hand and told him flat out that he painted beautiful paintings.
We had a fun time at Blue Anchor beach. Benny really enjoyed running in the soft yet firm sand. We enjoyed looking at where a red land mass has collided with a grey/blue mass. We touched these humongous boulders of pink quartz (white and black, too).
We went to gorgeous Lynmouth and took the steam lift up to Lynton. I bought some "American style" chocolate chip cookies. The Mrs bought some bread. At the lift station to go back down to Lynmouth, we had milkshakes. Mine was cinnamon and...eh. Too thin. The British idea of milkshakes is some sort of throwback to WW2 rationing. They don't use ice cream. Just flavoured milk. It's kind of dumb and useless.
We also went to Porlock and drove through loads of places numerous times. We went to Minehead and found it a bit rough. Wouldn't want to live there but could bear shopping at the big Tesco. We had to go back to Minehead to take Benny to the vet. He had ticks. I tried to remove one but left its head in. My wife did the same thing to another one. We then proceeded to inflict grievous bodily harm to Benny's arm and genital region by trying to dig out the heads, first with a pair of tweezers, and then a piece of one of my disposable razor blades. Poor pooch had two ugly lesion-ulcer-looking things on him---and still 2 tick heads imbedded within his skin. Mrs Newport feared an infection, thus the visit to the vet.
The vet was nice. He said there shouldn't be any problems and gave Benny an injection for good measure. He said there are ticks about because the farmers don't burn their fields anymore. This used to kill off the ticks, and if didn't, the winter did. Nowadays the winters are mild and the ticks are surviving.
