Our first holiday trip out was to find somewhere to get a replacement for our blown out tyre. Easier said than done on a Sunday in rural Devon… we drove around Torbay looking for an open garage without any success at all. There’s loads to see and do in the Torbay area though, and we spent quite a lot of time there.
Torbay consists of three fairly large towns – Torquay, Paignton and Brixham – all very different in character and all well geared up for tourists.
After giving up on our futile tyre search we stopped in Torquay for a look around. There’s no beach near the main part of town but there is a harbour/marina where those who have more money than sense park their yachts. There’s a reasonably sized shopping area with a few high street names in amongst the more interesting independent curio shops, so it made for a pleasant afternoon spent wandering around and enjoying the sunshine, which had thankfully replaced the previous day’s mini hurricane.
There isn’t much for a toddler to do in Torquay other than looking at boats and seagulls. Little’un wasn’t bored but I think she may have been had we stayed any longer than an afternoon. It seems to be largely made up of retirement homes so it’s geared up for older people.
Paignton, in a complete contrast, is a great little family resort. It’s kind of like a nicer, quainter, cleaner Blackpool. There’s a lovely wide beach that stretches right along this section of the bay, with rows of bathing huts, all painted white with different coloured roofs and eaves, lined up along the shore. I really wanted to get some arty photos of the beach huts but never managed to.
The main street is full of bucket‘n’spade shops and coffee rooms offering enough Devon Cream Teas to make even the most enthusiastic foodie’s arteries clog up. There are shiny amusement arcades (I’m a total sucker for anything shiny) where you can feed 50p’s into machines and grab yourself a Giant Zippy-from-Rainbow – the Yorkshireman wanted to win one but ended up feeding a few quid into the machine to no avail :(, Zippy kept slipping tantalisingly from the grasp of the grabber thingy. Little’un had a whale of a time riding the kiddie rides though. I sometimes wish I was two years old.
There are plenty of attractions geared up for families in Paignton, although Little’un was too young for most of them. She would have been perfectly happy playing on the beach with a bucket and spade and tormenting the seagulls by pretending to offer them crisps then shoving the crisps into her own mouth at the last minute though.
We had a day out at the zoo, of which more in a later post.
If I were asked to choose I would have to say that my favourite of the three towns has to be Brixham. Brixham is a busy working fishing port and harbour with restaurants and shops selling ice-cream made from Cornish clotted cream clustered around the water.
You can walk all around the harbour, past private yachts and beaten up fishing vessels to a sea wall at the southern end. Perhaps our lovely day was helped somewhat by the glorious sunshine that we basked in, but I reckon that the harbour with the colourfully painted houses rising steeply above it would have charmed me in all weathers. Disappointingly, and somewhat typically, we managed to find the only ice-cream hut in Brixham that sold Tesco Value ice-cream instead of the yummy home-made stuff that we really wanted. Sigh.
There is a beach at Brixham at the southern end of the harbour but it was very steep and pebbly. Great for skimming stones though.
So there you have it. Three very different towns all within a few miles of each other, each worth a visit for completely different reasons.
More holiday tales over the next couple of days.
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