Nothing starts your day quite like a family sized pot of coffee with your cooked breakfast.

When I checked in I’d been asked what time I’d like breakfast, with the options being 8am or 9am. Going to bed well after midnight I’d been regretting signing up for an 8am start but the evening nap had done the trick, and by 6.30 I was ready to get up and had a leisurely hour drifting in and out of dreams before making breakfast on time.

What didn’t work was being a 40 minute drive from the day’s entertainment, getting in the car at 8.30 and realising that I’d get there nearly an hour before it opened. So I took a detour instead, to look at England’s only real competitor to its oldest (and finest) graffiti.

He was.. a disappointment. It’s a tad awkward describing a man with a 36 foot long cock as ‘too small’ but really I’d been expecting a little more. I had to put a telephoto lens onto my camera to get a picture – the one above uses my mobile phone’s maximum digital zoom, hence the grain. He lacks the grace, simplicity and presence of the white horse, and now I’ve seen him, can’t compete at all.

At least the drive to find him was nice. Lovely rolling chalk hills covered with farmland, forests and small villages. I chuckled at the sign for Puddletown rugby football club then drove through Piddlehinton. But this is a quintessentially English part of England.

After a 3/4 mile detour to find the sculptures I found out it costs £10 to see them, so that didn’t happen. Instead I got to see more of the lovely countryside driving to my real destination.

My real love for fighting vehicles requires them to be airborne (so I really should go to more airshows) but there’s still something impressive and at times beautiful about 40 tons of steel with a big gun attached. I discovered today’s collection while I was in Holland, researching around the trip there. They have a lot of steel in the museum, including a number of unique pieces, a few ‘firsts’ (and one second) and quite a few vehicles still running, some of which they bring outside for a daily show. Today’s show consisted of a Ferret, a Saracen, a FV432 and a Leopard.

They do have the usual ‘ga ga’ approach to Tiger tanks, with an entire display of just those. To be fair, it’s got a Tiger II prototype, a production model, a Tiger I, a Jagdtiger and a Tiger (P). The full set really. None of them anywhere near as awesome or lovely as the Challenger II parked nearby, looking every bit the master of the battlefield it continues to be.

Best tank in the museum would be annihilated by the Challenger II. I don’t care, love the Panther G anyway.

Tonight’s dinner is at the sort of restaurant that offers a tasting menu. I declined the free olives and reluctantly also turned down the complimentary watermelon and gin. The bread basket was excellent, let down only by butter so hard you could play squash with it.
Halfway through the bread I was caught out by the delivery of a brocolli and blue cheese soup with red onion croutons, apparently to compensate me for missing out on the gin. I don’t like brocolli or blue cheese but decided to give it a go anyway. Not something I’d order again but the strong flavours were muted and it had a nice texture. I finished it with the thought, “That was actually quite nice”. It was only an espresso cup’s worth, so no photograph.

Starter was wild forest fungi mushrooms with falafel.

Main was guinea fowl, with wild fungi mushrooms, bacon, asparagus and stuff. They retrieved the menu before I could work through everything on it. There was a layer of potato, hidden below the breast. while a separate vegetable board offered carrots, more potato and green things. I left the green things.

I think it’s the first time I’ve had guinea fowl. Lovely texture, gentle taste – more chicken than pheasant. I’d be happy to eat it again, albeit not at the same price as the restaurant’s three course set menu (which had chicken as its main).

My second coffee cost more than the first. They charged me for petit fours, although I only ate the apricot and chocolate one. I’d have eaten a dozen, it was scrumptious.

Tonight’s hotel is a lovely room in an extended farmhouse, in the middle of a working farm. It’s almost idyllic. Sadly Devon is mimicking Dorset in its utter inability to provide anything remotely resembling an internet connection, with (up to) a 280k link and 1100ms ping times to UK sites. Despite this it’s still better than last night’s, but it’s annoyingly close to an ASA complaint.
Ok, I spoke too soon:

Pinging newswww.bbc.net.uk [212.58.246.80] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 212.58.246.80: bytes=32 time=2007ms TTL=50
Reply from 212.58.246.80: bytes=32 time=1162ms TTL=50
Reply from 212.58.246.80: bytes=32 time=1985ms TTL=50
Reply from 212.58.246.80: bytes=32 time=2407ms TTL=50

Ping statistics for 212.58.246.80:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 1162ms, Maximum = 2407ms, Average = 1890ms

It’s a damning indictment of BT’s use of the rural broadband money they took from the government. (Later in the evening the router crashed, reset. This resulting in an additional 100ms to average pings)