7 days and 1000 miles later and we’re home safe again. We’re glad to be home again even though we had a really good time.

Here are a few highlights, as always the whole album can be seen here at flickr.com

We spent most of last Saturday travelling, with two brief stops. The first was at the Severn crossing. We elected to go over the older of the two bridges on the way, and the new one on the way back.

Sarah decided it was a good time for a game of peekaboo:

And then the second stop for lunch at Porthcawl.

We arrived at the cottage in Pan-teg around 2.30pm and got settled in. The view from our front door pretty much sums up the feel of the place:

There were birds everywhere, mostly Peacocks and Peahens which were overly active. Each morning we opened the blind in the lounge to reveal a guest at our window:

They also had doves

And some less active birds (Don’t panic, it’s plastic!)

They had all the traditional farm animals too, and something a little more along Dogga’s lines:

On Sunday we had a trip to Gwilli Railway where a nice man showed us around the signal box, and I changed some points.

We had a ride along the line and back, but unfortunately they were only running half the length of the line.

Apparently a couple of weeks earlier Kiera Knightley and Sienna Miller were siting in the same carriage as us to make some boring film that will be out next year. Here’s the seat they were in in case you’re interested:

At the far end we had lunch and rode on a slightly smaller train

The start of the ride went through a tunnel, and we assumed it took a circular route back to the beginning, but as it turned out it went about 50 yards passed the tunnel where the driver moved the engine to the back of the train and pulled us back to the start. We were the only people on it and felt very silly at this point.

Monday took us to the Welsh Botanical Gardens where there were some lovely fountains.

They had a ‘glass house’ which a very masculine and angry sounding woman explained to everyone was called a glass house and not a green house because it was real glass and it meant they could call it the biggest in the UK, or the world or somewhere…

While walking around the grounds a fly mistook Sarah for a plant and pollinated her. It doesn’t sound very interesting now, but at the time I found the thought of Sarah mating with a plant highly amusing.

Later in the afternoon we went to Tenby, and after the rain let up, and we finally found the beach(!) we decided to go for a splash. There were absolutely no waves whatsoever, so we paddled about on our bodyboards and just had a bit of a muck about.

Tuesday morning, or what was left of it after our lie in, we spent Geocaching. We failed to find the first one as it had been placed in a churchyard which was cordoned off and so we couldn’t get near it.
After a longer walk than was actually necesarry, we found the second one, and oddly enough, it was the second time I bumped into the owner of a cache within a few weeks! He was maintaining the cache when I found it. On the walk up to it, Sarah had a nasty argument with a barbed wire fence, twisting her ankle and gaining a nice bruise and slash down her side. I followed this up by putting my hand into stinging nettles.

Still, finding the cache helped cheer us up a bit, and we had a nice chat with the cache’s owner as we walked the shorter route back to the car. The rest of the day we spent in Swansea bowling, watching Oceans 13 at the cinema, and eating a lovely italian meal.
(You may have guessed I didn’t take my camera on Tuesday).

Wednesday we went to Aberistwyth to visit my old college and school friend James, who will love this photo I’m sure:

Aber has a lovely castle ruin which after I took photos of Sarah standing under the tower of, James informed us it’s on the verge of collapsing. Nice.

Thursday saw us doing some more Geocaching, one by a really cool tower,

and another just across the valley at another ruin. You can see the first tower in the background:

After that we headed back to Tenby, on the south beach this time, to have another go at catching some waves, but as you can see, what we caught can be described as a ripple at best! All good fun though.

The Red Kite feeding station was our destination on Friday. We witnessed over 50 red kites feeding which was really amazing to watch. They gathered in nearby trees one by one and once the guy who took our money had distributed lots of dead mice etc around the paddock in front of our hide and left, they all flew into action and fed for around half an hour due to a couple of heavy showers and a couple of Buzzards muscling in on the act.

I got a bit trigger happy with the camera at this point so got lots of pictures very similar to this one:

One of the interrupting buzzards:

Saturday meant it was time to come home sadly. We got away from the cottage for about 9ish and decided to stop at Big Pitt, a coal mine and museum where we plummeted 300′ underground and walked around the mines seeing how it had changed through the ages. At one point the guide got us to turn our helmet-lamps out to experience the pitch black. Very odd.
He also got incredibly distracted from his talk by a persistantly quizzing little girl who asked if the pitt ponies who lived in the mine had their own pillows. The poor guy didn’t know what to say!

Across the new bridge for the return journey and we were home by dinner time.

Back to work again tomorrow. Only a month until We’re off to Devon for our anniversary though!

forgive me for breaking my blog-of-silence, but Jonny showed me this and I just had to put it on here.

“Man attempts flying attack on the pope” is a story currently being run on the Metro.co.uk news website.
The headline alone causes slight chuckling. Coupled with the image of the gentleman in question in mid flight toward the pope I found this hilarious, but the thing that really takes the cake is the need they felt to include a link to “see a video of previous pope attacks”.

wow.

just wow.

My goodness it’s been along time since I posted. I’m sure I had something interesting to post, with pictures, but it temporarily escaped me what it was. I’ll shall be sure to let you know when I remember it.

Right now we’re preparing to go on holiday to wales, so I’ve broken my blog-silence, to warn you of the forthcoming blog silence… hmm.
We’ll be in Carmarthenshire for 7 whole days from Saturday during which we’ll be enjoying many days bodyboarding, geocaching and relaxing at our lovely cottage with a large hot tub in the garden and views over the welsh hills like this:

My parents have been caravaning near us for the last week, so we’ve spent a few evenings with them, and on Saturday I gave my dad his first experience of geocaching. I’m not sure he was that impressed to be honest, but each to his own I suppose.

Aha. I remember what I was going to post now.
It’s my visit to the CRE in Esher.

Each year my employer visits many conferences and exhibitions that are church related in order to advertise, and to provide opportunities for our customers to have face to face contact with us to ask questions and complain at us about why the law is the law etc. This year was my third year of manning the stand for a day at the Christian Resources Exhibition at Sandown Racecourse. It’s always a good laugh and we get treated well my Chris the sales manager.

The only downside is that it’s a really long day. Leaving home at 7am and not getting back till late evening.
Still I always enjoy passing under the flight path at Gatwick on the A23:

We arrived at Sandown at around 9.30am and after a quick drink and croissant at Costa, set to work tolerating the public (actually it was good fun). I went to see what sort of crowds Chris was pulling for his seminar on ‘copyright in the church’ and then had a wander around the exhibition to see what was about. Some of the exhibits seemed somewhat unrelated with items such as classic cars:

and bizzarly, a stall selling wicker coffins!

You can even watch them being made, should you so desire…

It got pretty quiet at the end of the day, so we had a good chat with some of the other exhibitors, and a catch up with some of them who we’d seen the year before. The whole day is always good fun though and it always beats a normal day in the office.

I shalln’t bore you any longer with corporate outings, but shall continue my blog of silence until I return from wales with Celtic tales of what we’ve done.

Taraa for now.