England 2025- The Eden Project and Peace
To this day I don’t actually know if our GPS was sending us on a wild goose chase or if these roads really are the main thoroughfares through the peninsula. Leaving Truro our navigation system tried to send us up what looked like a private driveway but looking back now may have actually been the correct road. We did lots of re-rerouting, backing up one way streets and finding ourselves exactly where we started from. It was so frustrating.
Getting to St Austell meant lots of hedge lined lanes and lots of one way streets. St Austell is incredibly difficult to navigate by car. I wouldn’t recommend it. In fact if we ever try to do it again, I’d park somewhere else and take public transport into the town. We found ourselves following the signs for public parking and hoping for the best. As we rounded a corner and found a tiny lot, the car in front of us proceeded to enter the part of the street that went from two ways suddenly to a one way. With a car coming the opposite direction we were about to witness a collision. There was much honking of horns happening and I frantically told my husband to reverse the car pronto. We were about to be hit. We were so lucky that there was no one behind us because my husband had to act fast. The car in front of us, in their own panic started to reverse without even looking, and with speed. We peeped our own horn to alert her to our presence which caused her to jerk the wheel to the left, sending her car right into one of the metal stanchion polls of the chain barrier surrounding said car park. We watched in slow motion as she slammed the back of her Volkswagen Golf into a metal pole. That poor woman was shaken up. We could see her clearly, and see her hands shaking as she sat in shock. She was so flabbergasted initially that no part of her registered her surroundings. She drove off in a hurry, probably full of embarrassment and we finally entered the car park shaken ourselves by what we had just witnessed. It was at that point we found that the public parking spaces were full up! That was our cue to just go. We decided that St Austell didn’t want us as visitors. We were better off just getting out of town and going straight to our intended destination.
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| The scene of the near collision where it suddenly goes from 2 way to 1 way. Those are the metal stanchion poles the woman reversed into. |
We had a similar situation with being redirected onto new roads that were just fields a year ago. GPS was having a hard time because some of these roads were so new they didn’t exist on the map. As far as the car was concerned we were off roading it. I thank our lucky stars that we were not in Cornwall during the summer rush. With the weather being as spectacular as it was the area was busy but not “summer crowds” busy. Pulling into the network of car parks at the Eden Project we found ourselves in the “orange parking zone”. Being here in off season meant we didn’t have to park in a far away lot but one closer and walking distance to the visitors center. As soon as you leave the car park you are instantly in lush vegetation. Well maintained pathways lead you to the large visitors center where you pay quite a hefty ticket price to enter. If you live nearby, or plan to visit multiple times the $56 per person price tag is actually quite reasonable because the ticket is good one for full calendar year.
We paid the fee, bought a guide book and set about learning what the Eden Project actually is. To quote the guidebook, “In the year 2000, we transformed a sterile china clay pit in Cornwall into a global garden as a demonstration of positive transformation.” The first thing you notice as you exit the visitors center are the very large domes made of ETFE foil (ethyl tetra fluoro ethylene) and steel protecting the biomes beneath. We learned that this material was used instead of glass because it is strong, transparent, more lightweight than glass, is a better insulantor and more resistant to weather and direct sunlight. They use multiple layers of this material which gives it a bubble like look.
The first dome that we entered was the Rainforest Biome. This dome is home to four of the world’s rainforests, featuring plants from Southeast Asia, West Africa, Southern and Central America, and the tropical islands. What do I remember most? How hot and humid it was, the giant hibiscus flowers and a misty waterfall. But mostly how hot and humid it was. Because England was having a heatwave it was also hot outside, so walking into the Rainforest Biome was punishing.
The beauty of the biome more than made up for the discomfort though. A slow and steady climb up the gently sloping path takes you higher and higher winding you past the flora of Southeast Asia, West Africa and eventually depositing you in the cloud forest of Central America. This area was my favorite part. You walk a rope bridge, which was admittedly scary, but your bravery is rewarded by the Rain Shack. You enter the “rain shack” by way of a bridge which emits mist as you walk through. This is a most welcome experience in an otherwise tropical heat. This bridge leads you straight to a waterfall. So incredibly peaceful. Again, I was grateful to be there during a shoulder season where you could almost pretend to have the whole place to yourself.
As gorgeous as the Rainforest Biome was, the real treat was the Mediterranean Biome because a taste of home was waiting just beyond the doors. There’s nothing like going away to make you appreciate what you have. I am very grateful to have been born where I was and to be able to still live where I was born- but sometimes I need an extra gratitude boost. This was one of those moments. Here I was thousands of miles away and here was a tiny piece of my home positioned as something exotic and foreign. To meander through the California exhibit and look down to see the very scented geranium that I have right beside my front door, the blanket of bright orange California poppies that grow wild on our hillsides or the giant bougainvillea that you know contains thorns because you learned the hard way from the one your grandmother had on her little deck, was just the little push that I needed to be grateful for my home. I didn’t need to visit a greenhouse to encounter those things, I could just walk out my own front door. It was another profound experience to add to the one I had experienced earlier with the friendly shop assistant in Truro. That feeling of gratitude, happiness and the comfort of familiarity was just right beside you, ready to be grasped and recognized. Because no matter how much I love England and feel at home, sometimes you just need a little bit of actual home to land in your lap.
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| When you find your best friend’s favorite flower you take a photo for her |
As you leave the Mediterranean biome you find yourself walking through a plethora of poppies. Something I haven’t mentioned yet are the wild poppies of England. California has its orange variety which grows lower to the ground and often in clusters, while the wild poppy of England is tall with bright red petals that look like delicate paper and have a black center. You will see whole fields of them, or sometimes just a lone plant on the side of the road. You can find them all over the country but as we drove farther north we began to see more.
This exhibit of poppies was mesmerizing and the perfect way to end our time in the domes. We decided to settle ourselves down in the cafe with a lovely view of the cultivated gardens outside. One of the things I realized on this trip is my lack of photos. I was really in the moment on this trip which is wonderful at the time but now that I’ve had some distance I find myself sad that I didn’t document more of this trip. Usually my phone is out taking videos or loads of pictures but this time it was in my pocket a lot. It’s times like these that I wish I had taken a photo of the garden that we were now sat down in. The view from our bistro table while we sipped our lattes was so charming, but alas I have no photographic evidence just the memory in my own mind.
My husband and I sat there for a while, enjoying that feeling of having nowhere we needed to be but where we currently were. We are our best selves while on vacation and perhaps that’s true for everyone but I for one become a completely different person on vacation. Relaxed and free of my usual anxiety, my husband’s jokes suddenly become funnier, and his annoying habits not so annoying at all. He becomes happier too and in general the world just feels right. For just a moment sitting at that cafe everything is as it should be and I just kind of love everyone and everything just a little bit more.
Walking back to our car I took a deep breath. We had a few more days in our Cornish bubble, where the weather was downright Californian, the maze of streets to our airbnb remained charming and the beach across the street beckoned upon our return, asking us to put our feet in the water and stay in this temporary paradise for a little while longer.
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