Exeter; Sunday, 29 May, 2016

Another pleasant breakfast completed and I headed out to the station to pick up the train to Okehampton. This is quite a big thing, as the line to Okehampton closed in the early 1970s. However, for the last 10 years or so the local railway company, in cooperation with the Dartmoor railway that now own the tracks, have been running a Summer Sunday service between Exeter and Okehampton. It’s clearly well liked as the train was busy most of the way through.

Arriving at Okehampton I headed out of the station and walked down the quite long hill into town, thinking as I went that I was going to have to do this in reverse later in the day, and then onto the ruins of the impressive Okehampton Castle, located a bit further out of town.

The castle can trace its history back to shortly after the Norman invasion and was in use right up until the point the family who owned it ended up on the wrong side of Henry VIII and his executioner.

I had a long wander around the castle taking in the ruins as well as the stunning views up onto Dartmoor before realising it was time to head back to the station if I didn’t want to spend another 4 hours in the town, which whilst it looks very pretty, probably didn’t have enough to keep me entertained for that length of time.

Back in Exeter I had a quick lunch and tried to decide what to do next. I could have visited the city’s museum as this was my only chance, with it being closed on a Monday, but in the end the weather made up my mind as it was just too hot and too sunny to spent it inside a museum, so I headed back to Exeter Central station and picked up the train down to the coast at Exmouth.

Unfortunately, almost everyone else in Exeter appeared to have had the same idea, and to make matters worse the previous train had been cancelled, so the already full train when it pulled in was rammed full by the time it left and then only proceeded to get fuller at all the following stations – accompanied by increasingly ignored pleas from the guard for everyone to move down inside the train so that everyone could get on.

Eventually, having taken closer to an hour rather than the 40 minutes it should have taken, we arrived at Exmouth and I headed down through the town to have a look around and take in the much more pleasant and refreshing sea air.

The beach itself was heaving, and the queues for the Ice Cream kiosks were horrific, but thankfully I’d spotted that there was a local open-top bus service so I used that to take in the key sights of the town.

I spent some time in Exmouth before finally jamming myself back onto another packed train back to Exeter. Back in Exeter I grabbed a bit to eat and had a look around the city centre in the peace and tranquillity of the late evening, before heading back to the hotel for a quick drink in the bar and then bed.