Posts with the label Wales
Showing posts with label Wales. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wales. Show all posts
26 Aug 2017
Video | Adventures in the Brecon Beacons
B A N K H O L I D A Y.
I'm currently lazing around with un-brushed hair, no make up and no bra and if that's not a crackin' start to a bank holiday weekend, then I dunno what is.
G and I are are 'hosting' a St Albans pub crawl this afternoon with some of our favourite people so I probably should make myself look half decent are some point, but it the mean time, here's the video from the famous we-saved-a-sheep weekend in rural Wales (read more here).
Have a wonderful bank holiday weekend!
5 Aug 2017
Wine, puzzles & saving sheep: a weekend in Wales
I’m currently sat in the Waterstone’s café with a slice of Bakewell tart and my hair scraggily pulled up into a top knot.
Like am I peak hipster or peak old woman, I dunno.
Anyway, Wales.
A couple of Fridays ago me and the gals (minus one of us – you were missed Ele) headed off on a picturesque drive through the Cotswolds to a cottage in rural Wales aka the Brecon Beacons.
Our drive mostly consisted of Becca alternating between napping or singing, Claire and I discussing weddings (hers) and me eating an excessive amount of Percy pigs. Why are those pig faces so god damn addictive?
After two hours, we hit the narrowest country lanes known to man. Tree branches were hitting the windscreen, we had to pause to allow several hay bale-carrying trucks and/or tractors to pass by and there was a tiny bridge I’m pretty sure was not designed for vehicles to be driving over.
Our designated driver may have sworn a few times.
We eventually came to the gate to our cottage and realised we had to drive through two fields to get to it. I mean there’s ‘remote’ and then there’s just off-roading.
The cottage was adorable. The green hills rolled around us and the only sounds (apart from us) was the occasional ‘baaaa’ from the many sheep. We retrieved the key from the little wood shed and let ourselves in to the cutest little living room, with cheerful bunting and a log fire. There was also crumbling stairs that we agreed should not be navigated after wine (advice we promptly ignored for the rest of the weekend).
After running around and allocating rooms and changing into our ‘casual’ wear which, yes, included socks and sandals, we settled down outside with prosecco and M&S vegetable crisps. We so fancy. We’d had the good sense to have the wine delivered to us before we set off but, after personally experiencing the narrow country lanes, we were very much expecting to receive a phone call from a lost Sainsbury’s driver within the next hour. We had our phones on loud and had already agreed that the best-case scenario was that we’d have to go over the fields back to the lane to collect the food. Worst case scenario: he would never show up and our food would be lost to the sheep of Wales.
And then we heard the sound of an engine.
We looked at each other somewhat bemused, stood up and, no word of a lie, a Sainsbury’s truck was bobbing towards us through a field full of sheep.
Not a sight you see every day.
I jogged over to open the gate and this cheery welsh feller jumps out and is greeted by the disbelief on my face.
“I didn’t think you were going to find us!”
“Oh no, your instructions were peeeeerfect,” he said in the strongest welsh accent and then proceeded to cheerfully carry all our food right into the kitchen.
BIG shout out to you Mr Welsh Sainsbury’s driver, what a gem.
Claire played food jenga with the fridge, I realised that I’d probably over-ordered on the cheese and baked goods and Becca assured me that could never be the case.
And then we got cracking with dinner.
The rest of the gals finally arrived (cheers London traffic you dick), we ate, we drank, we whacked out the cheese. Cos cheese is life.
Oh and Claire read us a bedtime story.
Liz and I woke up on Saturday morning to the sound of a crow tapping on the window of our room. Like, I dunno if he thought he was missing out on the party or what.
Becca and I went out to collect eggs cos yup, WE HAD CHICKENS. It became pretty obvious pretty quickly that we do not deal with farmyard animals on a regular basis. There was a lot of laughter and some mild hysteria but Becca emerged from the shed relatively unscathed and with some eggs. And maybe a touch of chicken poo on her hands.
After a lazy breakfast, we decided we were going for a country walk cos we’d actually all packed appropriately for this activity. Claire even downloaded the OS map app. This is true grown-up stuff right?
Mind you, despite the fact we had the correct clothing attire and OS map app, we did still seem to just walk straight out the cottage and off into the hills with no real plan.
This resulted in a more – we’ll call it ‘adventurous’ – walk than we originally intended.
For starters, there was the distinct lack of path. Apparently our surrounding hills were not frequently used walking spots and we kept finding ourselves in the middle of fields we weren’t entirely sure we were allowed to be in, or in the middle of fern higher than our heads, or walking past the remains of a long-dead sheep (this happened twice in the space of half an hour).
There was also the matter of the horseflies biting the crap out of us. And we had to climb over barbed wire fences more than once. This was fun when there was a handy tree to climb up and over, slightly more worrying when we just threw a coat over the fence and I wondered if I was about to do some serious damage to areas I may need when I get round to reproducing.
Then, of course, there was the sheep we had to save.
The poor fella had somehow managed to get his head stuck in a gate made up of criss-crossing bars. We weren’t entirely sure how long he’d been there but it was long enough for his nose to be bleeding, his head to be swelling and his mouth to be frothing. When we first found him, he was clearly panicking and kept bucking his back legs but after a while, he seemed to sense we were trying to help him and went very still, as though patiently waiting for us to sort him out. None of us had the heart to tell him we weren’t farmers and actually spend most of our time sat in an office.
The upshot is, we panicked a bit ourselves, frantically looked for a farmer, gave him some water and eventually accepted that, seeing as we couldn’t leave him to die, we were going to have to get him out ourselves.
Credit to Liz, Becca and Claire on this one; I was poorly attempting to flag down a tractor whilst they stood on the bar of the gate to weigh it down, lifted the sheep’s body up and then twisted his head out of the triangle-shaped hole he’d got it stuck in. When I turned round, he was stumbling towards me as though he’d had one too many glasses of sauvignon blanc. He paused for a moment, looked at us and then trotted off, ‘baaaa-ing’ as he went.
Needless to say, this gave us an enormous sense of well-being.
The rest of the afternoon was spent by the fire and dedicated to everything from pimms to hair braiding to baked goods to reading. Oh and the girls started a puzzle that would basically consume their lives for the next two days. Before we knew it, five hours had passed and it was time to crack on the BBQ.
Okay, no, there was no BBQ but we cooked burgers and sausages under the grill and then ran outside so it’s basically the same thing.
At some point we were back in front of the fire with cheese and wine and, well, an awful lot of singing. Who knew I still had every Britney Spears song lyric perfectly stored in my head eh? They’ve just been waiting for the opportune moment to emerge and apparently that moment was 2 in the morning in the middle of the Brecon Beacons.
Pretty sure there was also dancing to 5, 6, 7, 8 by Steps. Don’t ever say we’re not cool.
After a particularly divine breakfast of scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, avocado and tiger bread on Sunday morning, we actually looked up a real walk (like, with a path and everything) and then hopped in the car to Sugar Loaf mountain for a walk amongst the clouds. We got soaked to the very core but it did a mighty fine job of clearing up the hangover and the views were rather sexy once the clouds shifted.
There was also a bunch of sheep that stared at us for a while but we assumed it was in admiration because they knew of our heroics from the day before.
When we got back, Becca had the divine idea of baking a camembert in a loaf of bread and if that’s not your ideal Sunday afternoon right there, then you need to reassess your life.
The never-ending puzzle continued, Liz plaited both mine and Rosie’s hair this time round and yes, there was more pimms, more wine, more baked good and more singing. Liz also impressed us with the dance moves from our year 8 talent show performance; still stored in her head 12 years later.
And then it was Monday and we had to leave and we were sad. Although we did stop off in Abergavenny on our way home for coffee and/or milkshakes in the sunshine which I can think we can all agree beats the average Monday.
Things to note:
There is something really special being in the middle of nowhere during the night with absolutely no sound and hundreds of stars twinkling above you.
If I drink alcohol constantly for 3 days, I do not feel fresh come day 4.
I am a lucky gal to have a group of friends I still love being around after 16 years.
You can put ‘sheep life saver’ on your CV right?
The puzzle was never finished.
30 Sept 2016
Festival No.6: the good, the bad, the ugly | Day 4 (Aka Stranded In A Flooded Field)
So I'm recapping our time at Festival No.6 at the beginning of September. This final post doesn't include seeing Bastille live as we did on Day One (here) or halloumi fries like we had on Day Two (here) or gorgeous estuary views like we saw on Day Three (also here).
Yup, it's finally time to tell you about Day Four and how we got stranded in a flooded field.
Day Four
The good:
• Unopened tube of Pringles still in the car. Win.
• Er, that’s it.
The bad:
Someone (looking at you FN6 organisers, looking at you) thought it would be a good idea to have the park and ride site on a KNOWN FLOOD PLAIN.
HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF ANYTHING MORE RIDICULOUS?
Nah. Didn’t think so.
For the record, we were not aware of this when we parked our lil (note: white) Fiat Panda in the field when we arrived. If we had, we may have considered parking elsewhere. If we’d know it was going to rain two inches in 12 hours and the river would burst its banks... we’d have got the train.
Before leaving the site on Monday morning, event organisers were walking around asking us what time we arrived. The deal was; if you arrived before 2pm on Friday, your car probably wasn’t underwater. If you arrived after 2pm on Friday, stay on site cos you were fucked.
We arrived at 10:30am on the Friday so we took our chances. We pressed our mud-stained faces against the window of the shuttle bus as we drove into the park and ride site. G saw our lil car and, from a distance, she looked like she was still standing so we felt hopeful.
LOL.
They told us that those in the furthest field shouldn’t even attempt to get out but the rest of us should try and, if we got stuck, to put our hazards on and a tractor would come save us.
Um, come again?
Yeah, 20 tractors and a JCB digger driving round rescuing smelly festival goers and their cars from the mud.
The ugly:
Our car was right at the end of the field before the end field. I.E. we were a mini swamp and traffic cone away from being in the field that was totally buggered. But, hey, we could still see a great big patch of green grass near our car. We had hope.
We were idiots.
We got approximately five foot from our original parking space before we were in the middle of what can only be described as a well disguised swamp. That patch of green grass wasn’t such a good thing after all.
After several unsuccessful, mud-spattering attempts to move, we accepted we were well and truly stuck, flicked the hazards on and sat politely in the car waiting for a tractor to come and save us.
Just in case I had to get back out in the rain again, I kept my waterproof on but pulled a bin bag over myself in an attempt to keep the car seat dry. Just call me Kate Moss.
What soon became obvious, however, was that this was not a time to be ultimately British. There was no order, no system, no ‘who was here first’. The JCB digger came past us several times without registering our existence (but then he also got stuck in the mud which was equally satisfying [karma] and worrying...) and the tractors weren’t coming anywhere near our direction. More and more people were arriving back to their cars, flicking on their hazards without even attempting to move and being rescued before us simply because they were in close proximity to the tractors.
This was less than ideal.
Eventually, I got out and waded/slipped my way over to another car who had been there a while and the woman inside told me that a blue tractor was making the rounds in that area but it might be best to wave when he’s nearby so he’s aware we were there.
Which is how I ended up jumping up and down in the mud wearing a bin bag every time I saw a tractor nearby. What is life.
FINALLY, after what felt like hours, the JCB digger returned after freeing itself from the mud. The driver stopped by us and shouted down at me.
“Have you got your tow-eye in?”
My what?!
He raised his eyebrows at me.
“That would be advisable” he said with a look of disdain and DROVE OFF.
This from the man who had managed to get a JCB digger stuck earlier.
Prick.
After literally ripping off the cover in the boot (turns out G can snap a hefty chunk of plastic in half when he’s annoyed enough), dropping the tent into the swamp (where it fully submerged itself in swampy water) and scrambling through the car manual (So. Many. Paper. Cuts.), we found the tow-eye buried under the spare wheel and screwed it into the front of the car.
We then both did some more jumping up and down like lunatics as tractors kept driving to save other people and finally, with epic music playing in the background*, a tractor drove towards us.
The driver gave us a polite nod, hopped down, tied the car and tractor together and off we went.
Now, if you have ever had you car pulled over what can only be described as actual MOUNTAINS of mud by a cheery welsh tractor driver, then you will probably understand how surreal and ridiculous those few minutes felt. If you haven’t, I can’t help you I’m afraid.
The car was covered in mud; most worryingly, it was stuck on the underside and in the wheels, and we lost the cap that covered the area where the tow-eye screwed in but it still worked and we managed to make the four hour trip back. Other people weren’t so lucky and the mud caused irreversible damage to their cars. May those four-wheeled heroes rest in peace.
The rest of the day included a desperate attempt to find a public toilet in the middle of Snowdonia National Park, a filthy Burger King, horrendous traffic around Birmingham and the discovery that my thumb had gone grey (literally) after wearing a plaster for four days.
Needless to say, we were both exceptionally happy to get home, shower and sleep.
*alright, the epic music may have just been in my head.
26 Sept 2016
Festival No.6: the good, the bad, the ugly | Days 2-3
Day Two
The good:
• Listen up. The day started with banana, peanut butter and salted caramel crumpets. Yeah, exactly.
• It was really interesting to listen to a Q&A with Ricky Tomlinson and Johnny Vegas talking about Ricky’s time as a political prisoner and the film they made documenting it.
• We hid from the rain in the comedy tent all afternoon. Discovering new comedians that made our ribs hurt from giggling helped us forget that we resembled a pair of drowned slugs.
• Welsh choir. I spoke about these guys last year but they are so very impressive no matter how many times you see them.
• Halloumi fries. I don’t really need to say anymore, surely?
• A cute, make-shift wine bar. It had fairy lights and was a lil bit magical. The cushions on the seats were soaking after the downpour so hi wet arse but you can’t have everything. Fairy lights and wine made up for it.
The bad:
• It rained two inches of rain in 12 hours. Literally bouncing back, with little shelter. It took approximately one and half minutes for every single person at the festival to be soaked to the very, dark core. There were also 40mph winds. Just to add to the bants.
• The comedy tent had a power cut thanks to the weather and we were all ‘evacuated’ because health and safety regulations meant that no one was allowed to stay in the tent whilst they fixed it. We stood in the rain for 45 minutes waiting to be let back in. Oh torrential downpour you cutie.
The ugly:
The mud. Imagine Glastonbury. But with everything on a fuck-off big slope. And without any of Glastonbury’s methods of dealing with it. How I escaped with both my wellies, I’ll never know. Also my laptop keeps trying to correct ‘wellies’ to ‘willies’ and I’m giggling like a five year old.
Day Three
The good:
• Last year, I discovered the performance poet JB Barrington who is so, so good. We were part of the crowd in his intimate, 45 minute performance this year and therefore part of the few people who saw him propose to his partner. Pretty darn special experience.
• Remember the goat’s cheese, walnut and honey sandwich from last year? Yeah, well, it happened again.
• So we got lost in the woods (on purpose) and then made it our mission to get down to the beach. When we finally got down there (after a spot of abseiling... don’t ask, just look below), we basically spent two hours walking along the endless sand and clambering over rocks in our wellies, like we were kids all over again.
• A hot dog covered in chilli, cheese and jalapeños and a peppermint hot chocolate. So many new taste sensations in one go!
• Oh and I also experienced literally the best mint choc chip ice cream I’ve ever had. Life complete.
• I mean, who doesn’t want to see Noel Gallagher and several thousand people sing Wonderwall live? All together now: I said maybeeeeeee....
The bad:
Yeah, so you’d have thought getting down to the beach would have been simple but it involved just a spot of, ya know, abseiling. You had to grab this old piece of rope that looked like it was there by accident, swing off the path and shimmy down a small cliff face. Yeah sure, it was only a few feet but this shit does not come naturally to me. G shimmied down all casual... I dropped like a potato. And got rope burn.
The ugly:
• Whilst in the crowd watching Echo and the Bunnymen, the girl next to us was attempting to toss off her boyfriend. I did warn you it was ugly.
• Warnings were flashing up on the screens asking people who had driven to the festival to remain on site the next morning due to the fact that the fields where the cars were parked had flooded... Oh, that would be us then.
Keep an eye out for the next post which involves a car park on a flood plain, tractors & JCB diggers and a hella lot of mud...
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Hey there!
