“Daddy, what did you do during the rail strike?” Well, I was at home but I was meant to travel, from Barnstaple back to Berkshire via Exeter, after a week’s holiday in the English countryside, and had ended up going a day early, as allowed by my rail company, GWR, to avoid Saturday’s industrial action. With ticket restrictions lifted on Friday, I broke my journey at Exeter for 6 hours and did a bit of unscheduled budget tourism, wading my way through a sea of students as I walked into the city.

Here are my seven pleasures with a travel tip tucked in at the end.

Pleasure No 1: The cathedral. A huge, beautiful relic of the Middle Ages and intervening centuries – you can chart the course of the British Empire in the memorials. Pray for free or pay £7.50 and still pray if you want to – there are plenty of quiet chapels waiting to be used. Top tip: gift-aid the ticket price (if you can) and you get free admission with the same ticket for a year.

Pleasure No 2: The city museum – the Royal Albert Memorial Museum or RAMM for short. Went in to see a scale model of the original Roman camp which gave rise to the city – I remembered this from a similar quick visit years back. The diorama was gone but the museum has been extended to let in light and space, and it fits in a lot of local and global history. I found a bloke who used to double as a Roman military engineer and who also remembered the diorama as well as the fun of replica Roman military gear, and that cheered me up. If you are interested in Roman stuff, you could do worse than scan the small number of finds on show, note the city streets where they were unearthed, and go out and walk around them, using your imagination.Fun bit: a machine with a tiny mechanical museum installed behind the glass which comes alive each time you drop in a £1 coin. The money goes straight to RAMM.

Pleasure No 3: Following the route of the old Roman walk down to the quays and watching the pleasure craft and swans on the waters of the River Exe. Cafes and craft shops as far as the drunken eye can see.

Pleasure No 4: The Oxfam Bookshop was all the shopping I wanted to do, but the city is crammed with every store and bodega you could probably desire. Some store you thought had disappeared into the internet may well be alive and kicking up an alley in Exeter.

Pleasure No 5: A huge mug of piping hot black breakfast tea in the museum cafe with a piece of almond cake and a bag of local crisps. Nutty black Americano coffee with delicately orange blossom-flavoured carrot cake at a cafe called Devon Coffee, where USB ports dot the wall and the other customers are fun.

Pleasure No 6: Watching huge, muscular sea gulls stalking people eating their lunch on the green outside the cathedral while frightened pigeons circle in hope of crumbs.

Pleasure No 7 was people:

• A young couple in a rowing boat out on the water who seemed unable to paddle together but too much in love to care
• A man escorting two beaming women who gave me directions to the cathedral. “It’s behind all that stuff up there”, he said, smiling too, the “stuff” being other buildings
• A young lady with bright ear-rings and coloured hair, dressed like a fugitive from a desert caravan, who cheerily parted with a friend in a cafe by crying out, “Bye, bitch!” I propose this should be written in big letters over the ticket gates at the city’s railway stations to raise the tone of departures

That travel tip for those who don’t already know: if you need to leave luggage, and the railway stations no longer offer the service, there is a website called Stasher which finds you locations willing to accept it for a modest fee. I safely left my case at a hotel near Exeter St David’s Station for just under £7.