Conway Family: Tintagel castle

On the first full day of our holiday we went to the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth. The highlight was seeing the shark feeding in one of those rooms where the fish swim over your head etc. There were also stingrays in the same aquarium and part way through the presentation Esther come running gleefully over to tell me that they stingray was waving and smiling at her! Funnily enough when you see a stingray flying over your head it DOES look exactly like it is smiling at you and its outside bits ARE wavy!

The next day we headed out to Tintagel Castle. We were really looking forward to going to the legendary castle of King Arthur and we learned quite a bit about how the legend came about -it was basically made up by a monk! What we didn't know was that it was a looooong walk to the bottom of cliff - you could pay for a landrover ride down! It wasn't suitable for pushchairs which was unfortunateas we had left our baby carrier at the in-laws..... 3 hours is a long time to walk up and down cliff sides with a baby.... We hadn't eaten lunch either and didn't get back to the car until 3.30. This is what I looked like at the end of the trek back from the castle:

This is the beach right under the castle, it's got some great caves, a little waterfall and lots of rocks so the girls were happy -Eliza literally filled her pockets with white sparkly stones which he scoured the beach for!

I was practising being a mermaid sitting with Alice on a comfy rock whilst the girls played:

Once you had treked down to the path to the visitors centre(the white building on the right down there) you had to then climb a billion steps up the side of the cliffs,tricky when you had to pass people coming down whilst also trying not to freak out that your kids might just fall over the edge... At the top there was NOTHING to stop you from falling over the edge other than a hand sized sign saying 'Caution: cliffs'. Yeah, thanks for that.

There was quite a bit to see up there -lots of ruins of little houses and gardens on one cliff and then you have to walk back down and up another cliff to get to the actual castle. Only Ben and Esther attempted them both. Why anyone would have wanted to live in such a tricky place to get to I shall never know. Me and the girls in the ruins...

Because of it being so high up and literally on the edge of the cliff I was in a state of constant fear and tension with a catch phrase of 'come away from the edge'. Ben kept joking with me that I should try to enjoy myself or at least look as if I was! Maybe we should have saved this outing till the girls were older... So here is a shot of me 'looking as if I am enjoying myself'!