A depression lurking off the north Cornwall coast eventually delivered the promised bad weather after dark yesterday and we had a slightly disturbed night punctuated by heavy spells of rain hammering on Billy Bailey’s roof. By this morning, the wind had increased and was gusting up towards gale force. We are in an exposed position atop a hill and Billy shook and rattled on his stays as the gusts slammed into his windward side. Some of the wind bled in through the fridge vents, which unfortunately faced into the wind, and caused some cooling draughts inside. In particularly strong gusts, our roof vent rattled even though it was as firmly shut as possible. Things were worse on the north coast where a car had been inundated at Zenner and some poor folks had been washed away by a flash flood.
Wifi here is also proving to be a wash out. We are in a McDonalds and, therefore, a McWiFi black spot. We had vainly searched Liskeard, our nearest decent-sized town, yesterday but all to no avail. The Caravan Club site’s telephone book subsequently suggested that the nearest McWiFi is 20 miles away in St. Austell. The Caravan Club’s site itself has wifi but I refuse to pay anybody £5 an hour for the privilege. It’s also “invisible” from our pitch. The neighbouring Tregoad campsite has a considerably more distant but surprisingly “visible” wifi to which our laptop occasionally claims to have connected but it isn’t open so we’ve had no joy on the piracy stakes there, either.
The wind persisted all day but the lashing rain was more intermittent. During one intermission we ventured out on foot to a neighbouring farm shop which reputedly possessed a cafe complete with an Internet connection. Here, the espresso was disappointingly mediocre and two people tried, without success, to provide us with the relevant security information to hook into their BT Homehub wifi connection. I was also somewhat bemused as to why the signal strength was a paltry 50% when we were sitting no more than three feet away from their router. After failing to connect twice, we gave up and returned to sit out the storm.
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