Portland Isle

 Friday 07/05/21

The weather outlook was great today, still quite chilly but sunny in the morning so we set off on our bikes.  To be fair, we still wear three layers of shirts, light fleeces and windbreaker / anoraks but at least we could leave the beanies and gloves today.

Our first view of Portland

The strange sight of the Covid-moored cruise liners 

We wanted to visit Portland Isle, via the fantastic cycle track through Weymouth.  It was another disused railway line (such a sensible thing to convert old railway lines to cycle/walk routes) which gave us some lovely views along the way, and also enabled us to avoid the traffic.  

We crossed over to the Isle and sat in the harbour for a cup of coffee.

A novel boat storage solution, don't tow it home, stack it in a big garage.

Portland Castle

Looking over Fortuneswell at Chesil beach

Lunch at Chiswell beach

We then went on a hunt for some public loos and were fortunate that this took us to a lovely spot on Chiswell beach (a small cove at the Portland end of Chesil beach) outside a café called Quiddles.  It was so peaceful that we stayed and ate our packed lunch.  

On the way back we stopped at the Chesil beach centre and took a walk up onto the beach.  The pebbles are fascinating, very uniform in size and shape and quite difficult to walk over.  You really get and idea of the scale of the feature when you walk out over it.  It was lovely to finally get onto the beach that we can see on all our walks along the Fleet.

Pebbles, pebbles everywhere!

Chesil beach extending off into the distance, the sea on
the left and the Fleet on the right

We had bought some groceries along the way so, heavily laden, we decided to take the more direct route along the roads; definitely more stressful, heavy traffic is very much a feature of the UK.  Really a fantastic day so far!

The campsite is filling up with weekend campers, so we're probably going to chill for the rest of the day.  Rain to come on Saturday.