Dinner in The Loft restaurant just along from our B&B the evening of our arrival was excellent, with the added bonus of three nests of baby seagulls on wall- and roof-tops visible about 15 feet away outside the window next to our table. Cute little speckled beasties with stubby winglets... Sally in particular could hardly take her eyes off of them.
I thought, however, less positively of the species at 4:15 the following morning when a group of adults greeted the dawn outside my open window! Not that I was sleeping (I had once again made the mistake of having coffee after dinner), but they made such a terrible racket that even repose was impossible. I got up to try to shoo them away... but they just stood, two feet from the open window, and looked at me. I did not have the sense that appropriate respect was being paid... so I went back to bed and eventually they stopped, and some time later, the coffe finally metabolized, I got a couple of hours of sleep.
The nights are, even when coffee is not a factor, short here at this time of the year. It is still light after 10PM, and dawn breaks as said around 4:15. Made me think of growing up in Newcastle, 350 miles or more north of here, where at the solstice you could still read outside towards midnight and it started to brighten again around 3. One paid for it in winter of course.
In the morning some of us walked around St. Ives, visiting the Tate (a uninspiring set of temporary exhibits in an uninspiring building) and failing to visit the local museum (closed on Sundays... but we'll go before the hike on Monday). Russ and Sally volunteered to do laundry for anyone who needed it in the local laundromat. And a few errands were run, phone calls made, email answered and so on.
In the afternoon we watched Federer conspire with Nadal to lose the French Open, Gabi, Thomas' wife arrived, and then we all went out for another nice dinner in a 14th Century pub down on the quay.
Nice place, St. Ives.
