The silver wedding double Cornwall holiday

The last time we had a two week holiday, and the only time I’ve taken more than a week off work, was for our wedding and honeymoon in 2000. So it seemed appropriate that we should take a two week holiday to celebrate our silver wedding anniversary this year.

It wasn’t initially planned that way, it was just the way it turned out. And it couldn’t have been better. Normally our holidays are a week at most and, by the time we’ve fully relaxed and settled, we realise there’s only two days left.

We already had a week booked in a dog friendly cottage in Padstow between 11th and 18th July. This was in the very small window between my son (a third year medical student) finishing university for the year and the schools finishing – pushing up the prices of holidays and making Padstow more crowded.

Our wedding anniversary was on 8th July. My husband had a look round for ideas of ways to celebrate and settled on two nights at Rick Stein’s sheperd’s huts just outside Padstow. This was the perfect choice for a couple who love Padstow and go on holiday there every year. Our two nights took us to Wednesday 9th July. Plan A was just to go home, then go back two days later. We would have been at home for literally about 36 hours and driven at least four hours home and four hours back again.

So we decided to stay in Cornwall.

Cornwall in July was especially beautiful. We’re used to visiting in August, and last year we went at the start of September. In July, there are more flowers out – both wildflowers and incredible flowers in people’s gardens. The hydrangeas in Cornwall are everywhere and they are enormous! In July we also got much longer days, of course.

Rather than spend more time in Padstow, we went to two different places – St Ives, which we’ve only ever visited for a few hours before and Charlestown/ Carlyon Bay, which my husband has visited a few times before and I’ve never been to. At both St Ives and Charlestown we stayed in St Austell pubs with rooms. The rooms were very nice, although rather hot in UK heatwave number 3 of summer 2025.

We had rather foolishly packed ourselves a suitcase each for our entire holiday. At the shepherd’s hut, there was no room for suitcases, but we just got a few things out of the cases and left them in the car, right by the shepherd’s hut. For our mini tour of Cornwall, we had to mix up our suitcases, so we only needed to take one into the pubs.

Parking at St Ives was in a large car park, about a mile uphill from the town centre. We were able to plug our electric car into a slow charger (cheaper and better for the car) and leave it on charge for six hours, before moving it to an ordinary space in the evening. We had to lug one suitcase down the hill to the pub and then back up the hill the next day for departure.

We weren’t at either St Ives or Charlestown for long, but we still had time to enjoy them. The highlights of our St Ives trip were a sunset on the beach, then a stunning run out to Carbis Bay. This is where the G7 summit was held a few years ago and was the most beautiful beach I’d ever seen.

At Charlestown, the highlight was a coastal walk out to Carlyon Bay and a delicious meal in a local restaurant. Charlestown is a very small harbour town, which seemed to be punching above its weight in terms of its restaurants and bars.

At both St Ives and Charlestown, a breakfast in the pub was included in the price.

We had a lovely mini tour of Cornwall, but by the end, I was looking forward to eating a normal breakfast and not living out of an increasingly disorganised suitcase. We were also ready to see the kids and Hetty. It felt like every single couple we’d seen while we were away had a dog with them.

So on Friday 11th July, we headed to Padstow to meet our kids and Hetty for another full week of holiday.

We had a lovely, relaxing week with Hetty and the kids. As our house slept six, my parents visited for a couple of days at the start of the holiday and my son’s girlfriend visited for a couple of days at the end.

In total we were away for 12 days, with two full weeks off work (or away from work in my husband’s case, because he still had to work a bit on holiday). Being away from home and work for that long was amazing. I’d forgotten about the pressures of daily life and felt completely chilled.

It’s a long time until our next milestone wedding anniversary, but I think we might do a longer holiday again sooner than that!