Mini Moon | A Cornwall Photo Diary
Having a wedding in February was necessary because of cider season but when it came to booking annual leave off work it gave me a conundrum. I didn’t really want to go on honeymoon straight after the wedding and use a whole host of AL in the beginning of the year but we both felt like we’d need a break - so we compromised.
We’ll be going on a 10 day honeymoon to celebrate 10 years together over the early May bank holiday (more on that to come in the next month) so we booked a few days away only a car drive away on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall.
We luxed out and booked this Air Bnb Plus cottage in a tiny village outside Bodmin and it was a lovely little base for a relaxing 3 nights away. Aside from getting down there I didn’t want to make any plans, having had enough of planning in the 11 months before the wedding I thought just taking each day as it comes was the best course of action for some r&r. And in the end, that’s exactly what we did.
We arrived at about 8pm on the Sunday night after the wedding having driven through Storm Ciera and made a big bowl of cheesy pasta (the meal I didn’t know I needed until I ate it) and went off to bed, the weekend having hit us full force.
Probably the nicest bit of the whole few days away was not setting any alarms on a weekday and on the Monday morning I should’ve been at work, and instead I woke up in the comfiest bed with my husband making me tea and toast. The storm was howling the whole time we were in Cornwall and by 11am on Monday we had a power cut….a power cut that lasted all day. After lazing about in the morning we decided to head out and brave the weather to get some food in and charge our phones and allllll our portable chargers in the car.
After visiting the heady heights of Morrisons, the weather was horrific so we holed up back in the cottage and lit a fire because everything was freezing. Amazing what you take for granted until you have no power - when I was cosied up in 5 layers and a wooly hat indoors, the thing I wanted most was a warm cuppa with my easter egg and I couldn’t even manage that. We whiled away a few hours looking at all the photos we’d snapped and all the videos our friends had sent us and then, just as the phones were dying and the light had got bad enough we couldn’t ring books - the lights flickered and power resumed.
We were fighting a losing battle with the elements, though the bed was hideously comfortable, neither of us was sleeping well because the cottage was in seemingly the biggest wind tunnel ever and the cold and the noise was howling through every window. We couldn’t stay in because it seemed like a waste of the time away and the power was off, but we couldn’t venture out because the storm was raging ferociously so on Tuesday we braved the cold and donned our hats and coats and headed out in the truck for a few hours.
From the photos, you’d be forgiven for thinking we had a lush blue skies few days away but actually, we were in Polperro for about 2 hours and it rained once and hailed once but we managed to get some sea air in our lungs and some pasties, chips and fudge in our bellies. Polperro is one of my absolute favourite places so wandering round the familiar streets filled me with joy and good memories and I picked up a little print to frame and a fridge magnet for our kitchen to remember our mini moon by.
The rest of our time was filled watching movies - something we haven’t had the chance to do in a good year (we watched It Chapter 2, The Joker and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood) and cosied up with lots of cups of tea in front of the fire. We had a wedding card box given to us by my friend who got married last year and we took that and our bags of wedding presents away with us. We spent a lovely hour one of the evenings opening cards and looking at our gifts and reading our guest book and feeling all warm and fuzzy for all the love that was sent our way.
My top mini moon tips;
Book it. It doesn’t have to be a long fancy honeymoon to the Maldives, it doesn’t have to be expensive, it could literally be a travelodge in the next town over but I would 100% recommend you go somewhere, just the two of you away from home to have some time together, even just to chat about the time you’ve just had.
Don’t go home. This was something I massively wanted to avoid, thinking that going home would snap me out of the wedding bubble immediately and I planned to drive straight down there from our wedding venue but actually in the end we had to pop back to swap from my tiny unsafe car to the truck so we could drive through the storm. It wasn’t so bad because we literally just swapped vehicles and went on our way but there’s something exciting about just going.
Plan to do nothing. Yes ok so you’re away and you probably want to see everything and feel like you’ve made the most of it but I cannot stress enough - plan some doing nothing into your schedule. Don’t set alarms, take the book you’ve wanted to read all year or the film you haven’t watched in the last 6 months and just chill the fook out.
If you can, take your wedding cards. I probably wouldn’t have if we’d been going abroad, knowing that lots of card probably contain cash or cheques but if you can, it’s really nice thing to do. Enjoy some time on your own together, reading all the lovely messages and remembering all the lovely little bits of your day.
