Wales

The lazy bug, which has infected me for the past few months, has temporarily lifted so I thought I would take the opportunity to finally update the blog! So the below happened about 6 months ago now, but it still feels like yesterday…

We left Devon early in the morning, saying goodbye to the campsite dog which we had befriended during our stay there, and headed for Wales. The drive was easy and relatively unexciting as we chose to stick to main roads to get to our overnight spot of Barry on the southern coast. We had very limited time in Wales as we had booked a cheap ferry for Ireland that departed in only 2 days, but hopefully we would have time at the end of the trip to scoot back through.

Barry was our chosen overnight spot. Being about 30 minutes south of Cardiff, it was quiet and rural and gave us the afternoon to explore some of Wales’s small villages. The campsite was rather awful however, and was basically a holiday park full of families and drinking teens. Pretty much like being back in NZ. <shudder> Although we derived plenty of humour watching the locals walk around shirtless as the hot summers sun beat down on their lobster red bodies. All this while we were sat in our chairs in jackets and jeans – it seemed that although it was cold, the fact that it was sunny took precedence and the locals refused to pass up an opportunity to getting a red tan!

The following day we went to the west coast and spent some time exploring Pembrokeshire. We started in Tenby, a coastal town popular with beach goers and sun worshipers. Certainly a very very pretty place, full of some very very poorly dressed people! If you have ever seen the “togs togs togs…undies” ad…this was a prime example: If you can’t see the water, then you are not in swimwear. You are in underwear. Seeing guys in speedos and nothing else in the supermarket is not the sort of sights that you come to see. (Sam agreed that the giant beer bellies qualified them as “not eye candy material”). But I digress…

We made our way to our overnight spot very very slowly, taking our time along the coast and through the small villages. We spotted a couple of old castles, and enough beautiful spots to fill several harddrives worth of pictures.

We spent the rest of the following morning exploring around the coast before catching the ferry to Ireland – the next part of our journey, although not before the automatic ticketing system failed and the poor dock staff, standing in scorching sunlight wearing all of their hi-vis gear, had to revert to reems of printouts, rulers, and pens in order to board the hundreds of people. But we got there in the end!