Wales? You can keep it!

After spending a month apart, Kelly and the girls in America and Sam in England, we decided that a nice, relaxing family vacation to Wales sounded like a great way to spend the week. A night in Cardiff, two days on an organic farm B&B on the outskirts of the Brecon Beacons (southern mountain range in Wales), two days on the Pembrokshire Coast (Wales' finest beaches) at a luxury B&B and another 2 days up in the Snowdonia Mountains. Sounds romantic, right?

Day1:
Cardiff was alright -if you were able to jump over the puddles of vomit left from the previous night's festivities. 3 piles in the shopping district on a Sunday afternoon (sorry, but it was really gross). Welcome to Cardiff, right? We did get to be the cheesy tourists: I kept waiting for the secret doorway into Torchwood to open up for us...

and to meet up with "The Doctor" (Dr. Who).


My favorite part in Cardiff was the castle.

We sat and watched a REAL puppet show "Sir Gawain & the Green Knight" at a Medieval fair. Too fun! The puppeteer was fantastic; he wasn't from Wales...

We also watched a sword fight between two nights in full armor. The girls liked it. Sam really enjoyed when one of the actors tried to be cool, whipped off his gloves and then proceeded to nearly cut his thumb off while fighting his opponent. That ended the sword fight and the ambulance came in and took him away.

Day 2 & 3:
Off to our wonderful organic retreat by way of the Brecon Beacons. We spent a day wandering through these mountains and found a sneaky trail that lead to a waterfall. We ran around jumping over bogs and mucky bits left by the sheep. This hour might have been the best hour of the whole trip to Wales.

Now, on to the Organic Farm B&B to stay for two days. If anyone has seen British comedy sitcoms, this was a mix between Good Neighbors and Fawlty Towers, without the humor. Rain, Muck, late for breakfast, early for breakfast, no one to let us in the house, the local pub just looking at us and saying they didn't speak English, only Welsh. We also suspect that we were sleeping in the couple's master bedroom and that the word "hospitality" doesn't exist in the ancient Celtic Welsh language. Maybe they thought we were Viking raiders...

Sam and I spent the evenings with a glass of wine while Sam tried to identify the smell in the house as either dog or goat urine.

Feeding the chickens and holding the bunnies nearly made up for the weather and the muck. Not quite though.

We went to the National Botanical Gardens and saw this stone that was used in an attempt to re-create Stonehenge. They couldn't move it by man-power, so after letting one sink in a lake, they gave up and left this one here. This actually took place a few years back.
No kidding.

We had a decent time at the botanical gardens looking at trees and fish from warmer climates until Sandy tried to swing on a rare Australian tree from the outback. It broke in half, we hid it and decided to leave.

We still had quite a few hours left in the day and, not wanting to sit in the welsh couple's bedroom at the muck farm, we thought we would check out one of the Castell Castles that were advertised every 68 yards on the road. No kidding, Wales has more ruined castles than you can count. We went to Castle Carreg Cennen. Beautiful ruins on a big cliff. It was so remote and impenetrable, or so says the brochure, that it only lasted about 20 years before the English trashed it. Then, the Welsh rebuilt it. Then, a bunch of Yorkshire men tore it down using hoes and rakes. Once again, we're not kidding. The walk up was mucky, but it was worth it.

The girls didn't particularly like playing in the ancient oven (Like Hansel & Gretel), but they had a blast crawling around on old stones, pretending they were the Queen & Princess of the castle.

Oh yeah, it rained and rained.

And there were some cool cows.

Day 4:

On to Pembrokeshire, the jewel of Wales. To the Cathedral in St. Davids way out on the end of Wales, sticking into the Irish Sea. Supposedly, this cathedral is made of purple stone with gold highlights...

-yep, this was supposedly "purple and gold"
Do YOU see purple and gold cathedral? hmm... us neither. Notice the lovely weather?

Thank God we had a luxurious B&B set up for that night right on the coast... oh wait. Never mind. It's not on the coast and it was anything but relaxing. (We got the evil eye over and over). although, I think you could just glimpse the sea when the clouds parted... Whatever, on to those fabulous beaches.

Here are shots from the most breathtaking beaches in Wales. The girls tried playing with the other children (who were all wearing wetsuits) but, apparently localism is very rampant in Wales. Their parents told us to leave them alone and play somewhere else.
So Sam tossed a shrimp he found at the parents and went on a hike to explore a cave.

The girls "accidentally" fell in the water. I think the temperature was almost 57 and windy. This last shot of Molly wraps up the whole week:

"I'm cold, I'm wet, and I want to get out of Wales and go home!"


We did spend the night in Pembrokeshire. At some fruity B&B with a host who was teaching yoga in a swimming pool and continually asking Sam why he wasn't talking. All this after we were scolded for showing up for 0800 breakfast at 0756. She then told us that she didn't cook for kids. They could eat cold cereal. So we ordered huge breakfasts, didn't eat it and told her we were leaving.

We cut our trip by three days and headed for Darley. Funny thing is that we literally crossed the boarder into England and the Sun came out and the temperature went up from 13C/55F to 20C/68F!

So ended the trip to Wales.
~xoxo~