Hi everyone,

It’s the end of Week 11, which means that’s it for classes this academic year but more on that next week. For today, I’d like to talk about the road trip to Devon in the last week of Spring Break. It was a very last minute decision to make the trip but when I managed to randomly find another 3 people who didn’t mind joining up with me (despite the mountain of work we had), everything was quickly booked and confirmed!

Devon’s motto is Auxilio Divino, which means “With God’s help” and I really needed that on the 4 hour long drive from Guildford to Teignmouth. It was nice to be behind the wheel again though so I really enjoyed that drive. This is the view from the Airbnb place in Teignmouth:

Devon’s all about the coast so we took a quick drive down to Teignmouth beach as it was already getting dark around 8pm or so. Teignmouth Beach is probably way more crowded in the Summer but it was way too quiet on a windy Spring evening:

There’s also Teignmouth Back Beach, which is basically the back of the main beach area and it’s here where you’ll see the little boats floating around:

We left in the late afternoon (around 3.30pm) so there wasn’t going to be much time for anything else except to have a look at Teignmouth beach and to rest up so that we’d be able to go around Dartmoor National Park the next day.

One of things that South Downs National Park doesn’t have is waterfalls. Dartmoor National Park on the other hand has a good number of them, the 2 best ones are Canonteign Falls and Becky Falls. We headed up to Canonteign first and although the rain threatened to spoil the day, my prayers for good weather were answer when we started the walk up. Here are some of the beautiful views from within the Canonteign Falls park close to Bovey Tracey:

After lunch, we headed off towards Becky Falls which had several walks that would cover the slightly smaller falls before leading up to the end, which was where the main falls were at. The gloomy skies actually helped to prevent over-exposure of the waterfall shots so I was very thankful for them! Here’s a handful of the ones I felt were the best among the lot:

Even managed to sneak myself into one of the shots 😎

After Becky Falls, we headed out of Dartmoor National Park and towards to coasts again, this time to Maidencombe Beach which is what people would regard as a quiet and relaxing haven. It’s got a sandy beach and has red-stone cliffs around it. If you look out towards the sea, you would be looking across the English Channel to maybe Le Havre in France.

The last stop for the day was Torquay which is a seaside resort town, also known as the English Riviera:

When you’re at a seaside resort town, you’ve got to have some seafood and I decided to go with mussels stewed in white wine, bacon and some cream. It came with a “side” of potatoes… which together is just too much food. Not the amount I’d usually be used to eating at home.

That was it for Day 2 and the obvious choice for the last place to go to on day 3 was Exeter since it was the biggest city on the way back.

It was mostly gloomy but all of a sudden… the dark clouds decided to go away:

That was the last bit and after this we were off driving back to Guildford again. Here’s me with the Audi A4 we had for the road trip:

It was nice to look back again at the trip in the last week of Spring Break just as I’m rushing out my Machine Learning code and the Supply Chain Analytics work. I’ll be back in midweek next week after it’s all submitted to talk about how this semester has been (or rather, just an update of how our MSc Business Analytics course has been). Until then… Have a blessed weekend! God bless! 🌈

Ben