We found a pretty beach in walking distance to our rental in St. Ives.
I had the enviable duty of watching Derek and Lydia play in the water.
The rental had boogie boards for us to use and Lydia in particular got into it.
This tiny old seaman's church was perched on the top of the hill looking out over the ocean so residents back in the day could pray for their relatives out at sea and then see them as they were coming in to port.
This beach was part of a research project from a university studying the effects of erosion via crowd sourced pictures. They had a stand set up and invited people to set their phone on the stand, line the beach up, and take a picture and then send it in to their website with the date and time it was taken. By having the stand there, assuming people did it right, the angles of all the pictures would be consistent and then the researchers could adjust for the timing with respect to tides and see how the beach was changing due to tidal erosion. Karina and I thought it was pretty cool, so she took pictures a couple of the days we were there and sent it in to be part of an environmental ocean study. Here's one of the pictures we took.
Our next activity was touring the Geevor Tin Mine. The mine was operational from 1911 to 1990 and when it was shut down due to the price of tin being too low to turn a profit any longer (at least partially due to cheaper mines in Asia), it was converted into a museum. Cornwall historically was one of the leading producers of tin in the world, so mines like this used to be all over the area. The Victory Shaft that lies below this building reached a final depth of 1575 feet below the surface. Tunnels shooting off that shaft angled downward with the deepest one going to around 2100 feet below the surface.
This statue of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz with his heart was kind of fun to see in a tin mine.
The most exciting part of the museum for the kids was a station where they could pan for small gemstones. We spent far longer than the typical tourist in this part, but we were well rewarded for our efforts as each person had a bag of multicolored pebbles to take home as a souvenir. Derek complained a few times earlier in our trip about how boring it was to go and look at rocks at places like Stonehenge and climbing rocks along the coast. I pointed out to him that he was getting excited about these little rocks that he pulled out of the sand and water. He thought that was funny and remarked, "Good burn, Bro Dad."
The mine consists of over 85 miles of tunnels like this. We saw a map of the tunnels and many of them went out underneath the sea a half mile or more. I don't think I would have enjoyed being a miner.
Here's Karina in the control room monitoring all the gauges.
After the mine, we drove out to Land's End, the southwestern tip of England. That day was really foggy, so it felt like the edge of the world gazing off from the cliffs to the foggy sea below. We had a very nice hike along the coastline.
We had fun climbing on rocks (I'm waving in the distance).
Lydia found a small crevice to cram into and pretend she was a badger or some other animal.
We found a nice meadow of wildflowers with soft grass and laid down to rest for a bit.
Land's End on that day seemed like the end of land.
There was a farm near where we parked our car for the hike that had alpacas. We had to stop to take a few pictures.
It was a good day.
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