Our room is on the top floor of a quaint three storey building and the wi-fi is non-existent up here. You have to go down to the ground floor lounge where it is pretty good. This had the advantage this morning of being able to talk with the former owner of the B and B and one of the staff. The lady owner, Theresa, has run the place for twenty years, with her husband until he died seven years ago. She is older than us, maybe approaching 80, and has recently sold to new owners. The new owners stopped providing breakfast. As of next Monday the place will be closed for 3 months and the new owners are gutting it and doing a complete makeover. The existing 6 rooms will turn into 10 and it will become a boutique hotel with no on-site staff. The lady was a bit sad about selling and a bit nervous about what to do with her days. Her family have been urging her to retire since her husband died.

For breakfast we went out onto the Quay and found a place with a good breakfast deal. A breakfast muffin (egg, cheese, sausage and bacon) and unlimited coffee refills for £4.00. The coffee was probably the best we have had in England so far. From there we walked around the Old Town down around The Quay which is the historic quarter of Poole. Lots of cruise and fishing trips are available from Poole. You can get a ferry to the Channel Islands and to France. Poole is the second largest natural harbour in the world after Sydney. It was an overcast and very windy day again so going out in a boat wasn’t very appealing.

We also checked out the route to the railway station and from which platform to get our train tomorrow. Moving day tomorrow: train Poole to Brockenhurst, train to Lymmington, ferry to Yarmouth, bus to Ryde.

In the afternoon the weather turned to custard, the strong winds continued and there was persistent rain. So glad we didn’t go out to Brownsea Island on a ferry to see the spiritual home of the scouting movement. The island was the location of an experimental camp in 1907 that led to the formation of the Scout movement the following year.  Eventually we retired to a cosy pub, The Poole Arms, for a celebratory “end of walk” glass of smooth Spanish red wine. It was very nice. There is something very, very comfortable about old English pubs.

One of the good things about walking the Coast path is that there are no mosquitoes, sand flies, flies or ants. The only pesky things are sandwich and chip stealing sea gulls. There are nettles and brambles though. Not such a problem for Barbara as she wore long walking trousers but in my shorts I had stinging legs on most days. The majority of the time the path is well trimmed but sometimes it is overgrown and you have to push your way through. The brambles I accepted because they provided a constant source of blackberries to eat as you went along. Barbara did get a thorn in her finger from picking blackberries and that hurt for a few days.

An update on the refund of our train ticket from London to Paignton. Because we had bought our tickets on line and chose the paper ticket option (not Q code or e-ticket) we had to go to a ticket machine and collect printed tickets. Then cut them in half vertically and scan or photograph them with a gap between the two halves to show they had been cut, and upload this to our refund application. The sensor on my camera was way too big so at first the jpeg would not be accepted, so I  had to resize it to a very small file size. Finally our refund application was accepted and we were told it would take up to 28 days to process and there may be a £10 administration fee. A further complication was that they were having problems with Mastercard and could we provide a UK bank account as back-up!! Just a day later we got an email to advise our claim was approved, there was no admin fee and a refund would be on my credit card in 7 days. Yippee!