November 9th 2014: Devon: Teignmouth

Monty the Motorhome is having his first real wild camping experience, as we are parked up in a large layby fairly close to Murviland. Tomorrow morning it will take just a few minutes to get to our 0900 appointment.

Today has been a complete contrast, weather wise, to yesterday. The sun has shone all day, with only a few clouds to spoil the party.

The day did not get off to a good start though - Ruth tripped the electric supply with her hairdryer. Luckily it was just a case of flipping the trip switch up on the campsite electric supply box, but for a few anxious minutes we thought there could be a problem with the van electrics.

Our sunny morning pitch

However events picked up after we left the site. A quick journey down to Dawlish was unproductive - no suitable parking as it was all Pay and Display with tiny little spaces, meaning we would have taken up two spaces - with the requirement to pay for both. No way. However we can report that the town’s Sainsbury has four designated motorhome bays - good for them, so we spent a few pennies on the Sunday papers there. I’ll be emailing our local store to say ‘why can’t you do this’. Undoubtably they will reply saying something about us not living in a tourist area, but to paraphrase another supermarket slogan “every little email helps’.

So Dawlish did not get our custom and we continued down the coast to Teignmouth and found the first car park we came to - Eastcliff - has free parking on Sunday from November 1st to April 2nd. We went in the bays designated for coaches, as they were all empty, apart from one where another motorhome had parked up.

Teignmouth is on the mainline railway route to Plymouth and the stretch between the town and Dawlish was built out from the cliffs to form a promenade. The line takes up most of the space, but a footpath has also been built in and we had a lovely stroll along it. With the sun beating down it really did not feel like November.

The promenade sits atop a substantial seawall

Looking back towards Teignmouth

The reason why this structure was built

Later we walked along the town seafront to the point where the River Teign comes into the sea. The place was really bustling and it could easily have been high season.

We moved on mid afternoon so as to get parked up for the night before darkness fell. Tomorrow’s post will say how we got on.