Wales!

Well, for the past couple of days I was very spoilt and have been driven around Wales and shown a lot of what the country has to offer. It seems that Rugby is not the only thing that New Zealand and Wales have in common. Several times I thought that I was back in New Zealand, the country side was so similar. If it hadn't been for the fact that they have slate-rock walls pretty much everywhere you drive I would have truely thought it to be so.

My sister Michelle and her husband Matthew, drove us (well Michelle drove, Matthew navigated) west out of London on Saturday morning after picking up the rental car on Friday night. We spent 3-4 hours on the road traversing toll bridges, small towns and slate walls to get across the country. We stopped in a a pink pub called "The Cider Mill Inn" and I got to try Rabbit for the first time! Not bad - a little gamey, like day old mince with perhap parmesan cheese hidden in it somewhere hehe. I'll have to try it again, not too sure if I like it that much :-) After that we found (after a little bit of searching) our first camping spot of the night. I had a 1 man tent and the married couple had a 2 man tent to share. But first, since we were so close, we had to try the pubs! The first pub, and the closest was a bit rough, Michelle was the only girl there out of about 20 locals and when I say local, I mean, rough and dodgy locals :-). We had a few beers there and moved on, else I could see a possible 50/50 chance of the night not ending up very well for us. We moved on, the next place was a restaurant and so we moved onto the 3rd which turned out to be a bit of a dog pub hehe. It actaully had 5 dogs in it when we arrived, and there were only about 10 people in the pub! haha! After a few beers we went back to the restaurant and had a bit of a late dinner and went back to our campsite, we got a bit lost and took a wrong road, but we eventually found our way back and the extra walk probably did us some good. We stayed our first night in a lovely little paddock/camp site near the town of Llangattock. For 5 pound we got a tent site and off we went. Was a great night. After we woke we drove out to the coast a bit and found an amazing campsite at a location called Llangelynin. It was a campsite that was basically on a cliff that was right on the beach. Amazing really. We had good weather for most of the day, and it did actually rain a bit but it fined up at about 4pm and lets us have a lovely bbq at 6:30pm. We had some yummy welsh lamb chops, sausages and cottage cheese hehe. The sun went down over the see about about 8:50pm and we retired to bed soon after. We drove back today - it took about 8-9 hours of driving with several tea and scone stops thrown in haha. Michelle was the uber driver and many thanks to her and Matt for taking me around Wales. I'll upload some photos around the place but I'll have to do it another time as I seem to have misplaced my usb cable and it's pretty late at night here at the moment and I don't want to wake anyone up.

Tomorrow I am off to Dublin for just over 24 hours and I will be flying there, and doing the Guiness factory tour - haha ofcourse... as what else do tourists do when they go to Dublin :-)

Cheers
Matt