UK Tourist & Leisure Attractions - Dorset

Lyme Regis was our destination on holiday day 4, where we soon found a nice little café to enjoy a delicious Dorset cream tea with jam scones.

It was yet another hot and sunny day for our visit to Lyme Regis.  This Dorset seaside resort is also a working fishing port and the bustling town has a museum and aquarium and plenty of fossil shops.  Lyme Regis's shingle beach is a haven for fossil hunters, but Belinda had brought her own!

We took a short stroll along the famous Lyme Regis Cobb which was featured in the film The French Lieutenant's Woman and has inspired artists and writers such as Jane Austen.  It was quite a drop either side; one side into the sea, the other into the harbour.  The Cobb dates from the 13th Century.

We only popped into the Cobb Arms for a snack but succumbed to a full meal before walking part of Dorset's South West Coast Path, intending to...

...walk east to Charmouth.  However, the nice lady in the tourist information centre told us the path that way was eroded and was diverted mainly along roads.  That didn't appeal, so we headed west instead...

...and climbed up to the South West Coast Path going west from Lyme Regis in Dorset.  To get up there we had to negotiate a rather shabby run down looking caravan holiday park...

...but in this direction, far from being a 'Coast Path' it seemed to run mainly in dense woodland.  Here a problem with the Sat Nav manifested itself - it had problems receiving the satellites.  See our review of the Sat Nav unit, worts (and we found a few) and all.

Mike enjoyed this ice cream that Belinda bought him, just what was needed after that hot and sticky walk.  He was almost as messy eating it as those monkeys the other day!  Lyme Regis boasts a number of fossil gift shops in a maze of narrow winding streets.

Day 5 and Mike should feel at home here on Chesil Beach, real Dorset Jurassic Coast country and part of England's first natural World Heritage Site.  No sooner had we arrived than we got swamped by waves of Geology kids students asking us questions...

...so we escaped by walking another section of the South West Coast Path, walking west from the small hamlet of Fleet and following a route running alongside Fleet Lagoon and Chesil Beach, in an area of Special Scientific Interest.  Er, more fossils?

How's this for an idyllic spot to munch our picnic lunch?  We found a bench in this lovely old church at Fleet, before continuing along that path on the right.

This part of the South West Coast Path contrasted with the section we did at Lyme Regis the previous day in that it really did follow Dorset's Jurassic coast.

Well, that Jurassic coast walk by the side of Chesil Beach proved to be the hottest of our Dorset holiday yet, so after following the Sat Nav back to the car in Fleet, we stopped off at the Kings Arms in Portesham for a welcome pint each, which didn't touch the sides!

On our last day we visited Dorchester and found the Town Crier in full cry - advertising a Pizza restaurant!

In Dorchester we visited the Tutankhamun Exhibition (cost £6).  Annoyingly, no photos were allowed inside but the exhibition was very involving and had a reconstruction of the moment Tutankhamun's tomb was discovered.  Then we moved on to...

...the Dinosaur Museum (another £6) housed in an old school in Icen Way (off High East Street) and full of amazing life-sized dinosaur reconstructions, skeletons and fossils.  See our UK tourist resources for websites of the places we visited in Dorset.

Feel a Dinosaur and Mike's face says it all - yuck!  See the dinosaur bite back on our great video clip of this pic!  Dorchester's Dinosaur Museum was fascinating, but uncomfortably hot inside on the upper level as it had no air conditioning.

Oh, Mike, you crept up behind me there!

On the last night of our Dorset holiday we enjoyed yet another visit to our 'local', yes, the Coach and Horses in Winterbourne Abbas, for a carvery this time.
You may be interested in our review of the Sat Nav receiver unit and how we found it perform on this Dorset holiday, its first outing.

We walked back from the pub to the holiday cottage (arrowed) along another stingy track rather than the road (Mike's suggestion this time); here's a shot of the farm the cottage is on showing its lovely rural setting in the Dorset countryside.  We had a hugely enjoyable holiday, blessed by some hot and sunny weather.