Day 1: Penzance to Land's End to Penzance to Newquay. 75 miles. The day started auspiciously with a rare straight-on gull photo.
After that it was pretty brutal. 5500 feet of climbing up and down the hills of Cornwall. It was 12 hours before we reached the B&B in Newquay.

It was about 830 when we left the lovely Lugger Inn in Penzance for a quick out and back to Land's End. The 25 miles ended up taking about 4 hours.
It's really really hilly here.

But we were carefree and full of enthusiasm as we rolled along the Penzance waterfront.

Along the way we passed this ancient burial chamber which for some reason they built the road right across.

After longer than we expected, we made it to Land's End.

Right to business. We went down to the famous sign to have our pictures taken. This is how you do it for free.

And this is when you pay for it. We had him put up Los Angeles because that's where Red Bear is from.
Well, he's really from China, but nobody can prove anything without the tag.

As we started back for Penzance we marveled at the scenery. It seems to be a holiday weekend, so the beaches were crowded in spite of'
weather that I would consider lousy. It turned out being cool and rainy. For us anyway.

The major incident of the day happened when I toppled over while navigating one of the ingenious traps they use to make
it hard to get onto trails. I fell into some brambles and drew blood on my arm and leg. First blood!
It turned out we shouldn't have been on that bramble-lined trail at all. There was a paved trail and we had missed the turn.

This is how most of the day looked. Wet road. Impenetrable hedges on both sides. No way to see oncoming traffic.
Makes the downhills not as fun as they should be. And there's probably a spectacular view on the other side of that hedge.

We stayed mostly on National Cycle Routes, which generally involved avoiding the populated valleys and the traffic, and sticking
to running up and down the many hills of Cornwall. Sometimes we were able to get off the roads and on to the paths. But they tended
to be of variable quality, ranging between pretty bad and very bad. The going was very slow all day, but eventually, as it was getting dark, we
reached Newquay, ordered and ate massive quantities of Indian food, and drank a couple beers.