Greek flame, UK route

It's all Greek to me.

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here's how to join in the Greek-lit Olympic flame on its journey around the UK.  This post is by Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).   

The 2012 Olympic flame was lit in Greece  - the original home of the games - using sun rays as they met a parabolic mirror on 10 May. Sounds like a super efficient way of creating fire to me.  And now  - whatever the weather throws at it - the flame is on its journey travelling up the UK from Cornwall. The route aims to take the Olympic flame no further than 10 miles from 95 per cent of the population. Quite an amazing piece of planning!

Look here to see where it passes you, and when.

As a little tribute to the moment the Olympic flame was lit I popped into a Greek bakery in Enfield (just by Oakwood tube) and bought a sesame seed loaf plus a box of olive paste-filled pastries as a gift for friends (see pic above). For £4 I got nearly 20 little snacks (rather different finances are used at the French bakery Paul where you generally spend an arm and a leg on daily bread). Yum.

Over to you
Will you see the Olympic flame pass? And have you ever used a parabolic mirror? For anyone interested in trying out a parabolic mirror for cooking, rather than just lighting a runner's torch, have a look at this video from the US. Or buy one for home cooking (assuming you are in the US) at http://www.greenpowerscience.com/SHOPARABLOICHOME.html

Surfing in the Cornish rain

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola (pic is of my surfing informant, George, 13)

Our house-sitting friends ring from Cornwall to say they are having a wonderful time: the surf is up thanks to this week’s bad weather which pleases the better surfers. The beginners aren’t missing out either because surfing lessons are run even if it rains. That's why you buy wet suits...

Mum and Dad can chill all day catching up on the novels they wanted to read (they recommend Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) until the teenagers turn up wet and hungry as night falls needing to be stuffed with pasta and tomato sauce. It just shows what a good time you can have when the crowds thin out thanks to bad British summer weather.

Exploring the River Tamar

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood whatever the weather. This post is from Nicola

Canoe Tamar http://www.canoetamar.co.uk/ offers guided river trips from Cotehele to Morwellham Quay, with a quarter of an hour stop off under the Calstock Viaduct in Cornwall. As it wasn’t far from here and I’ve been itching to get back into a canoe we spent the morning exploring the river. The River Tamar is spectacular in this area curving along what appears to be a lush bowl shaped and peaceful wooded valley that 150 years ago was home to the biggest copper producing mine in Queen Victoria’s empire – and the seam had been worked for centuries earlier than that. We are more than 20 miles from the sea but the river is still navigable and has been used as a pack horse, and linked with canals, which helped gets goods in and out easily.

There were about 18 other canoes with us, but as I turned out to be much the slowest paddler (Lola and Nell joined in occasionally but they preferred to sit and eat sweets in our big Canadian-style canoe) we were invariably at the back of the party so had the river to ourselves apart from an extremely friendly guide – sometimes Sue and sometimes Jo. This meant we had the lightning struck chimney and a sizzled oak pointed out on the Devon side of the Tamar; learnt about the lost village of Newquay that archaeologists only recently rediscovered and are now digging around in and heard the haunting whistle of the miners’ train going into the shaft of the George & Charlotte copper mine. It wasn’t a ghost express because they now run hourly trips for tourists visiting the World Heritage Site.

The river is strongly tidal so our group used this to go up river. Even so whenever the wind blew a little gust my canoe headed for the 2m reeds nestling into them until I convinced it to nose its way out. It was very atmospheric paddling through this – I felt as if we were in the Burmese jungle, but the river made us all mix metaphors… Nell saw the old mine workings on the hillside and asked if they were made by giant rabbits, and Lola kept saying she’d had a nightmare about the various structures – the viaduct, the wonky chimney – that kept emerging as we rounded the river’s bends.

At 1pm the tide turned but as we were only one corner away from our canoe end point we managed to paddle home, not more than 10 minutes after the others. And instead of being wet we were sunned, relaxed and able to leave the packing up to Canoe Tamar (tel: 0845 430 1208) while we bought delicious Cornish pasties at the Victorian bakery and then ate them on the back of a cart pulled by a Clydesdale to give us another view of Morwellham Quay http://www.morwellham-quay.co.uk/.