In lots of ways our weekend away was all about Lola. In the dog picture she is being Queenly in the van.

In the brick picture I just caught the delicious colour combination whilst she was having a determinedly slow sniff in a sunny corner of a National Trust property.

Our weekend away was about swimming at dog-friendly beaches and using our National Trust Card. Dog friendly beaches in summer months are a rarity and we don’t tend to use our National Trust card so much in peak tourist season.

We concentrated on beaches at the bottom of lush green  valleys. It was way too hot for anything else.

There was a delightful irony at one dog friendly beach. Dogs had free access to the beach, there was a coffee shop and shade. All sounding rather perfect but the beach was primarily a water sport location and for safety swimmers were corralled into a triangle of the sea, that was about the size of a swimming pool.

I did manage the usual splashy pose but it was hardly an open sea swimming experience. Although I did have the pleasure of swimming really close to a Cornish Pilot Gig.

All in all a successful experiment of finding exactly what Lola likes, exactly what we like and for the most part still avoiding hoardes of tourists.

I am not a tourist hater at all, they bring essential revenue to the Devon and Cornwall region. It is lovely to talk to people from all over the world who find this corner of England fascinating. I love touring our own visitors around in the summer months , I just prefer avoiding big crowds of people anywhere.

Just to prove my tourist loving heart I thought I would share one of my favourite sounds. The sound of the small wheels of hand luggage cases on the cobbled streets near our house. I realise the people pulling those suitcases may feel less romantic about the historic surface but it is a happy quirk of mine.

Less of a happy quirk recently when I was touring my old history teacher around our historic area. He had, what can only be described as a hand luggage mobility scooter. I think he felt every cobble on my extensive history tour. Two forms of suffering for him, an aching bottom and spine and my haphazard history tour with random facts flitting in as I recalled them.

A history tour not too dissimilar to a blog really. Random ponderings stitched together with slightly iffy threads at times.