Combe Martin to Shirwell to Stoke Rivers to Taunton

We had a lengthy list of things to do before we left Combe Martin, so mom and I decided to sleep in. Rather, this was the first time either of us slept through the night and we somehow managed to also sleep through our alarms. Ann came up from breakfast to check on us and woke us up.

After breakfast, I made a phone call to the car rental place. I had reservations allowing for an evening return of the car but the hours shown indicated that the location would be closed. With the following day a Sunday (on which the location would also be closed), I wanted to make sure that there was a way to return the car. I called Hertz and got instructions for returning the car after hours. Ann and I also had to finish submitting grades for the classes we were teaching that semester. She’d been working on hers the previous nights, but I managed mine fairly quickly.

Jerynn had gotten the instructions from the local, through the host, to the two graveyards we hoped to visit. We sat down with the very detailed map and plotted out the course. We would have to leave the map, so Jerynn made notes on our directions in keeping with our established navigation methods.

We left the BnB around 10:40 am, significantly later than we had planned. We drove first to Shirwell, where our directions led us straight to the single church and graveyard. We may have double parked, as it appeared someone was hosting a birthday party nearby, but no one seemed particularly bothered. The website I’d used to find the gravestones had included pictures, so we knew the shapes we were looking for, which was great because the day was gray and drizzly. Jerynn soon found the stones and we took some pictures.

My mom with the gravestone of one of her ancestors.

We drove on to Stoke Rivers - an adventure of a drive down one lane “roads”. We walked a bit in Stoke Rivers, because I’d found a place to park the van on the side of the road and wasn’t sure that I would find a better option. We were able to find the church and graveyard. Armed with pictures, the gravestones were not difficult to find. It’s worth noting that neither graveyard was particularly large, either. But we did have a surprisingly good time looking around. Jerynn, in particular, had not been looking forward to this part of the trip, but it turned out to be one of her favorite parts of the adventure.

Another Family Gravestone
From the left: Ann, Jerynn, mom, Dani

Then we were off for more adventurous driving. The roads did get progressively better as we went, at least until we got to Taunton. There, things got complicated again with one way roads and unclear road signs. But we managed to find the hotel and find parking on the street nearby. We unloaded the car and got settled into our “flat” - two bedrooms with a living room, kitchen, and single full bathroom.

It was one of our cheapest lodgings, selected because of it’s proximity to the train station. Location was probably the only thing recommending this place, as its list of faults continued to pile up. The outside door didn’t lock (this was fixed before the end of our evening there). The toilet didn’t have enough water pressure to flush several times in a row - a complication when five women would like to pee after a long car ride. The shower’s water pressure suffered as well. The oven was far too complicated for us to operate, though the hotel staff was able to get it going for us.

I left mom and Ann to settle into the hotel while Dani, Jerynn and I returned the rental car. First, we had to fill the car with fuel. We had seen a fuel station coming in, so we navigated back to it. Upon arriving, however, we could not see the entrance to the lot. I turned down a road, thinking it would lead to the gas station, but the markings on the pavement made both Jerynn and I think that I had turned the wrong way down a one way street. I made an abrupt decision to pull into the parking lot of a car body repair shop. Jerynn hopped out and ran down the road to the gas station. She turned around and called me, saying, “I’ll just stand here in the road and stop anyone who drives this way. Then you can safely drive into the gas station, even if you are going the wrong way down the road.”

Luckily, it was a two way road and the only person heading toward her was me, so we all survived the adventure. But this wasn’t the only time she had to jump out of the car in Taunton.

Next, we put the car rental return address into the GPS and confidently navigated to the address. Finding ourselves in the train station parking lot with no sign of Hertz, I hesitantly stopped in the taxi rank. We decided that I would stay with the car, as I was not legally parked, and Jerynn would take quick walk and look down some side roads to see if she could find Hertz.

Her adventures took so long that I called her twice. The second time I called, she had found the Hertz return but she could not describe where she was and decided it would be easier to walk back and provide directions. It was a good thing she did, because the Hertz rental car return was on the other side of the train station and set some distance off the road. (I would question her decision to walk back there, except that she found the place we needed to be.)

We stopped in at the train station to inquire about booking tickets for the following day. We should have had our BritRail passes with us to make the booking, but the agent took pity on us when the girls started talking about “getting mom and Grandma” and coming back to the station. She reserved five seats for us on the train the following day and explained what we would need to do to validate our BritRail passes.

We went back to the hotel with our train reservations. It was now three in the afternoon and we were all ready to find “lunch”. We tried a few places, but everything was closed between meal times. We found our late lunch / early dinner in a pub that wasn’t technically serving food at the time. It wasn’t the best food, but it was nice to sit down and eat something hot.

We walked around the small commercial area, picking up some snacks and a frozen pizza for Dani. This led to an adventure getting the oven in our flat to work, but we were all able to get enough to eat. We settled down to relax, collapsing in various places to read, write, or watch television. The journey was catching up to us.