Anniversary Weekend

August 16th, 2009 3 Comments »

6 years.. yup, it’s been that long. As a special treat I decided to take Vicky on a journey back in time to 1999 so on Friday evening we went for a Chinese buffet followed by bowling…. which I let her win of course :) . Between the meal and bowling session we had an hour to kill so spent a few minutes playing air hockey before discovering the ‘portrait’ machine.

The Rembrandt - small

We chose Rembrandt to draw our picture, incidentally he is American didn’t you know, judging from his accent. Saturday was a quieter affair… Paddy and Lorna passing briefly through on their way to catch the ferry, and I went to the Toyota garage to get my spare car key programmed. Worth the trip because you get a free valet clean and safety check whenever you visit them!

DFCAnd today we dropped the kids off at Granny and Grancher’s house before being driven to Maesteg. We walked back to the village through the hills which I like to call my back garden. The rain didn’t quite hold out but it was only light drizzle. The views were pretty decent once the clouds started to clear. This walk was just a 7 mile warm-up for Vicky… the real walk should have started another 5 miles North and taken in two more 200 metre climbs / descents but I decided we should start easy for now. Once we got home I helped Poppy make some little paper boxes and packets ready to put our DFC in. Sorry, that’s Daddy’s Fried Chicken. Well, it’s cheaper than another takeaway and kept her occupied for an hour or so!


Snowdon x15

June 28th, 2009 1 Comment »

I’ve just got back from my 15th (I think) trip up Snowdon. The trip started yesterday morning when I jumped in the (lightened by way of back seat removal) car and travelled around 4 and a half hours from South to North Wales. When I got there I set up the tent at the camp site and waited for my sister-in-law and co. After an evening of curry and Plop Trumps we retired for the nights. Getting up early this morning was easy cuz we didn’t sleep much (camp site was noisy.. booo), and we managed to get to the Pen-y-Pass car park for 6:45am. Good job we got there early because we ended up with two of the last 5 or so parking spaces – that car park is getting more ridiculously busy each time I visit it. We took it nice and slow to the summit as the weather was so hot, but the summit was covered in people wearing flip flops and trainers because the train service has started to run again. Looking around a gift shop at the top of a mountain is a strange experience but it has been done a lot nicer than the tasteless glass dome mockup I saw a few years ago. Anyway I’m back home now and covered in midge bites. Photos will follow once I get them off Helena (photos of the walk, not the bites).

Find-a-trig

June 14th, 2009 3 Comments »

What a busy weekend. My friend Pete (probably reading this on an RSS feed no doubt) came over to visit and so Friday evening ended with a mixture of Indian and Chinese grub. Pete then suggested that a suitable activity for Saturday morning might be a nice walk around the hills behind the village – a suggestion he may be living to regret. That was all the incentive I needed, and I kitted myself out with full mountain gear – overkill for sure but I haven’t used it in over 12 months so it needed an airing. Now you’ll need to check out the map for this bit to make sense:

ton-mawr-attempt1

We walked out of the village (failing to find the quicker exit straight in to the fields) and back towards the park. My intention was to find the trig point on top of Ton-mawr, marked at 319 metres in the map. Once we got just past the fort and along-side the forest we started to look for a way in – there must be a path to the trig point somewhere cuz it can’t possibly be inaccessible can it? Anyway, there was a path on the map running North of the trig point and I hoped that would have a footpath bearing south once we were on it. But, it looks like this search will have to wait until winter. The path was so overgrown, like over waist height for me (ankle height for Pete) so we carried on and went around the hill instead. It was a nice walk, 7.6 miles so a good walk-up for a planned trip up Snowdon again in couple of weeks. And I got to test out the compass on my fancy “Pro Trek” watch for the first time, very useful for a quick bearing… But back to the trig point. Once back home I did a bit of research… Should have done that before really but never mind. You can see from the Google Maps photo that there are three paths carved in to the forest, so I located the 1:25k scale map of the same area and you can see three white lines in the same shape. Not paths as such, but non-wooded areas that can only be seen on the larger scale map.

tom-mawr2

Hmm, the trig point lies right along one of these “paths” apparantly. I may go back later this week to investigate as I have the week off work, but even zooming in as close as possible reveals very little. There are a couple of white dots I suspect may be the trig point but my biggest task will be fighting my way through the clearings! I must find it… I need to visit my nearest trig point! Yes. I am sad, now you don’t need to point that out in my comments section!

Right… other news. Poppy is sick, and has tested the water resistant qualities of the laminate in the hall, Joseph is doing okay and feeding and growing and crying and feeding lots more. And I have a Java exam tomorrow so will get back to my revision.