flummery

We booked the aisle and window seats and even though they announced it was a full flight, no one has shown up for the middle! We would have offered them the window so that Geoff could have the aisle, but now we have the whooooooole row, and I'm pretty sure they've now secured the cabin doors! WIN.

We can hear the surf crashing just outside our window!

So, yeah, we got to Aberystwyth with no problem on a scenic three-hour bus ride. I have no idea how drivers manage big vehicles on these roads, and the secret is, sometimes they don't; at one point one lane of the (theoretically) two-lane road (one lane in each direction, that is) (well, two-thirds of a lane in each direction) anyway one lane was closed, and the driver couldn't turn the bus into the other lane, avoiding parked cars and cars waiting to come the other way, until he got out and moved one of the "lane closed" signs a couple of feet back. And there were plenty of times when the roadside hedge was audibly brushing the bus windows as we went by, and a couple of times when we came around a corner to find ourselves abruptly almost nose to nose with an oncoming car, which usually had to back up to let the bus complete the turn. Disconcerting to those of us used to wide North American roads with generous sidewalks or breakdown lanes; utterly unremarkable to the locals.

Aberystwyth is the big city compared to where we've been! According to Wikipedia, the twin towns of Fishguard and Goodwick, that we just came from, have a population of about 5400; Aberystwyth has maybe 18,000 depending on where you look? (And whether you're counting the university students, who won't arrive until just as we leave.) We went from the bus station first to the tourist info, where we picked up some flyers on coastal walks and such; then we staggered into the extremely strong wind coming off the ocean to our hotel, which was half a block from the shore.

Well. What we expected to be our hotel. It turned out to be a "self-check-in" place, meaning unstaffed; you walk in the unlocked door and the front desk has no human, just some folders with people's names on them, and you find yours and in it are your room key, hotel info, etc. You know you're in a low-crime area when! But there was no folder for us.

I poked my head further into the hotel and found a couple of guests in the lounge, who showed me the rather tucked-away button on the desk that might summon a staffer. It did not. So I phoned the number on the hotel's business card, a stack of which were also on the desk, and the guy who answered said a) he had no record of ever receiving our reservation through Booking.com, and b) the hotel was full, no vacancies. He was apologetic about it (while also anxious to assure me that he wasn't holding my money; Booking.com was), but there was flat-out nothing he could do.

I've never had that happen before! (Not that I use B.c that often, I always prefer to book direct, but sometimes either a hotel has completely outsourced its booking to third parties like B.c or B.c just has better rates and cancellation policies.) I had multiple confirmations from B.c, but apparently they were all auto-sent without the hotel's involvement.

So that was stressful! Geoff and I camped out in the hotel's wee lobby for a bit. I had my printout of B.c's confirmation in one hand, their website open on my ipad in my lap, and with my other hand I was phoning B.c customer support. Fortunately I did connect quickly with a human, who put me on hold briefly to call the hotel himself and confirm that they couldn't house me (I presume to ensure that I wasn't just trying to scam an upgrade) and then told me that B.c would cancel that booking and email me some possible alternatives, and I could book one of them and B.c would pick up any extra cost above what the original place would have cost.

He said the email might take 30-45 minutes to arrive, but in fact it took only a few minutes -- which I expected to be the case, since it's all automated; it's not like there was someone hand-curating my options, although the agent's spiel made it sound like there was. I picked the one with the best B.c reviews that was close by and on the shoreline, hastily booked it, and off we went into the wind again!

The new hotel is actually in a slightly better location and has an actually staffed front desk (by incredibly cheerful and friendly young women), and we're on the second floor ("first" to Brits) with a bay window looking directly out at the beach and the waves rolling in. (Today they're rolling. Yesterday they were crashing. Either way it's a lovely sound to fall asleep to.) There's also a small table and two chairs in the bay, to sit in and watch the ocean, but frankly Geoff has dumped his stuff all over them (my stuff is dumped all over the floor on the other side of the bed) and we like to just sit in bed, from which we have almost as good a view. And the bathroom is large, and has plenty of flat space on which to put toiletries etc., and also has a tub. Yay!

The only difficulty now is that I am absolutely morally certain that the agent told me on the phone that if I chose one of the options B.c sent me, they'd pick up the whole price difference; but the email actually says that they'll pick up up to £51 and change. The actual price difference is £105. I'm prepared to fight them on this (the phone call "may have been recorded for training and verification purposes," after all), but if we lose, well, worse things happen at sea.

Once we'd successfully checked in to the new place, we went out to stretch our legs and look around the center of town a bit. And we started by going back to an outdoor-gear store we'd walked past on our way to the tourist info, that was having a going-out-of-business sale!

I'd realized a few days before that the coating that lined my rain pants was disintegrating; they were shedding a fine white grit. And they had eventually soaked through, in that storm we were in. Durable water repellency doesn't endure forever. Also, my everyday backpack is a basic Jansport school bag; it's fine for its intended use, and I like that it's big enough to serve as weekend luggage (I'd say it's thirty liters) while still small enough to fit under an airplane seat, but when I load it up with rain pants, rain jacket, one or two midlayers, one or two water bottles, lunch, emergency first aid supplies, and so on for a serious day's hiking, I really regret its lack of a waist belt. Also I only have a cheap third-party rain cover for it, which you may remember proved totally inadequate against a real rainstorm. (I sure remember.) And, the other day, I noticed a thinning at its bottom where the material was beginning to think about wearing through; not immediately, but that's not something I want to run risks with. And I don't have a rain cover for my big (seventy-liter) hiking pack at all.

So we stopped into the store and I scored heavily discounted replacements for all of the above! Including a thirty-liter daypack with not only a proper waist belt and ventilated back panel but -- what I didn't realize until I got it back to the hotel and was exploring all its pocketses in detail -- its own integrated rain cover! Win.

After that we just wandered around a bit, and spent a good amount of time clambering around the ruins of the coastal castle, which was fun and dramatic and also very windy omg. We eyeballed a bunch of restaurants, but nothing screamed out "eat here" to us.

So we went back and had dinner in the hotel restaurant, because we were not up for researching a place; I had done enough frantic internet juggling for one day.

me at dinner last night: I think I'll have a big glass of wine.

Geoff: You should. You deserve it.

me: I had a very stressful five minutes!

(He did loyally remind me that in fact it was longer than that.)

+: Christine brought us to the bus station to catch the bus to Aberystwyth in good time, and the ride went smoothly

-: When we arrived in Aberystwyth, the hotel we had a multiply confirmed reservation at had never heard of us

+: We managed to hastily book what is probably a nicer hotel in just as good a location

???: Booking.com said on the phone that they'd cover the difference in price, but I'll believe it when I see it

+: The new hotel has a full bathtub

-: I have discovered, over the course of this trip, that some of my gear is on its last legs

+: We walked past an outdoor gear store having a going-out-of-business sale, and now I have new toys gear!

by which I mean work! Fun work!

Before we left on this trip, we'd booked a sea kayaking tour for today; with only two full days here, the idea was to spend one of them hiking along the tops of the coastal cliffs, and the other admiring them from below. Also we go lake kayaking at home, which we enjoy a lot though it is of course orders of magnitude more gentle than sea kayaking! We booked a similar sea kayaking tour in New Zealand years ago and really loved it.

But it was a lot warmer in New Zealand. And we weren't quite so tired. and we were a lot younger After the day we hiked through sideways hail, we both agreed that we'd just as soon give it a miss. But of course we were well past the company's free cancellation deadline. But fortunately (??) the forecast for today was for heavy rain and high winds. The kayaking company wrote to us a few days ago saying that the outlook was bad, and would we be willing to switch our booking to Saturday (yesterday)? No, we said, so sorry, we can't do that; and crossed our fingers. And indeed, on late Friday evening they cancelled Sunday's trip and said they'd refund us. (I haven't actually checked, but I assume the refund has gone through, or will on Monday.)

So we were off the hook! As I said in an earlier post, we laid in food (and beer) yesterday for tonight's dinner, so we wouldn't have to go out. And Geoff had the brilliant idea of asking Mike and Christine if they'd be willing to show us around the farm a bit today, maybe we could offer unskilled help with whatever they were doing? So we asked, if it wouldn't be intrusive (I mean, it's their home, and Mike's son is visiting), could we participate in their work today? And they were pretty surprised, I think, but said sure!

This morning I made a big breakfast for us with three of the six eggs, two of the four sausages, all the cherry tomatoes that hadn't gone off, three of the five huge mushrooms, and half a red onion that we'd also bought the day before, because for Geoff it's just not an omelet (well, a scramble) without onion. It was delicious.

They said they'd likely be at work in the barn behind the house around ten, and we'd be welcome to come by; but when we started over there a few minutes past the hour, Christine saw us passing their door and nipped out to say they hadn't started yet. So we suggested they just come by whenever they were ready for us, and went back to lounge about a while longer. Finally Mike came by and said he was on his way to the barn to split logs, and if we really wanted to come help, we'd be welcome.

It was ferociously windy and gusting rain, sometimes quite heavily. (Definitely not a kayaking day!) (At least, it was ferociously windy to us, but Mike said that 50kph winds are nothing, around here. Eep.) We put on rain gear, but to my private relief we ended up actually working inside the barn. (Mostly.) Mike was sitting at a powered log-splitter (somewhat like this https://www.homedepot.com/p/YARDMAX-6-5-Ton-15-Amp-Horizontal-Electric-Log-Splitter-YS0650/323678117), with huge tarpaulin bags of cut logs behind him, and it was our job to keep handing him logs to split, keep another bag positioned for him to toss the split ones into, and haul away the bags of split ones when they reached max haulable weight, piling them against a wall of the barn to be moved further (and sorted into shorter ones that would fit in their own home's wood stove and longer ones that would fit in the rental's) sometime later. Geoff also went out into the rain a couple of times to bring in wheelbarrows-full of more logs. Meanwhile Mike's son Aneurin was dealing with their apple harvest; they have I don't know how many apple trees, but I can see through our own window some trees absolutely flush with apples, and the strong wind meant lots of windfalls; so they had to be picked up and brought in and sorted into best quality/not so great quality/use right away, and the first two categories at least had to be put away, each variety separately in its own part of their apple storage cabinet. (Mike called it the apple store, meaning storage of apples; it looked like a tall enclosed cabinet with shelves, and I'd try to find a picture of the kind of thing I mean except that I know you understand that searching for "apple store" will not turn up anything relevant.)

Anyway, it was fun! We borrowed work gloves so our hands were protected, and I was careful of my back, and in about two hours we'd helped him split, at a very very rough guess, maybe fifty cubic feet of wood? We filled seven tarp bags to the limit of the weight that Geoff and I could haul to the side. I know that Mike couldn't have worked so fast alone, and we freed up Aneurin to deal with the apples; Christine was inside their house cooking and also directing Aneurin whenever he had a question about the apples that Mike couldn't answer. Certainly he and Christine seemed genuinely pleased to have us helping; Mike said a couple of times that we should come back, and we'd find the Cwtsh (our rental space) heated by wood we'd helped split!

Once all the wood was split, he invited us into their house for tea! Christine welcomed us in and made impressed sounds when Mike told her we'd filled seven bags of split logs. The kitchen, which was the room we walked right into, is a wonderful space. She said that when they bought the house about twenty-five years ago, she initially didn't like it at all; it had been redone badly and uglily in the seventies (a drop ceiling instead of that gorgeous medieval vault! Terrible colors!), and they tore all that out and restored it to what it had been, except of course with all mod cons. Her oven and hob are tucked into the huge stone arch that was the original fireplace, and the ironwork chain and hook that were originally over the fire, to suspend the cooking pot from, are now hanging decoratively from the rafters. She has floor-to-ceiling shelves on one wall that are largely filled with enameled cast iron pots and pans; I expressed my admiration!

Mike took us further into the house to a small solarium, filled with plants; he successfully grows pineapples there, as well as a cinnamon plant, frangipani, limes and lemons, and more that I can't remember. (Imagine being in a Welsh market and seeing pineapple for sale labeled "locally grown"!) We oohed and aaahed, and then came back out to have tea with the two of them and Aneurin, although Aneurin looked at his phone and excused himself once he'd finished his cup. We chatted about what Geoff and I do for work, and Christine told us about working in professional storytelling and also writing a book of local folktales (https://www.amazon.com/Pembrokeshire-Folk-Tales-United-Kingdom/dp/0752465651 -- there's a copy of it in the Cwtsh but I hadn't realized it was by her!), and also about falling in love with the property despite its hideous 1970s tat when they learned that it has its own spring-fed water supply. We talked briefly about the awfulness of climate change. (I forgot to say that earlier, one of the times she'd come by our place for some reason, I'd said something that made clear I was originally American, "but these days I don't admit it," and she shudderingly concurred, and added that they have a swear jar in the house, and every time That Man's name is mentioned, the offender has to put a pound in.)

They invited us to stay for lunch; but we demurred. I at least didn't want to overstay our welcome even though they pressed us a bit, and I didn't want them to feel pressured to socialize at the expense of getting necessary work done (there's a lot more to do; Mike described a lot of work that's going to be done in and to the barn, in preparation for which a lot of space has to be cleared in it), and I was a little socialized out, to be honest, and wanted to have a chance to relax and also catch up on blogging! Also we really have overbought food -- we still have bags of nuts and dried fruit for hiking that we haven't even opened yet -- and while I'd always rather have too much food than too little (especially on long hikes; imagine if that sideways-hail hike had been even longer and worse, and if we hadn't had plenty of calories available if we'd needed them), we really didn't want to spoil our appetites for dinner, when our wee fridge is bursting with the food we laid in yesterday.

So we said many thank-yous on both sides, and Geoff and I came back to our space. Mike commented that the rain would probably stop in good time for us to have a dry, if windy, evening walk, but we've just been sitting around contentedly on our devices (and Geoff had his usual-when-he-can afternoon nap). Tomorrow Christine will give us a lift down to the bus station, where we'll catch a 10:48 bus to Aberystwyth; the timing apparently works well with an appointment she has, which is great.

It's been a fabulous visit, and I'm sorry it's so short. The location has its inconveniences (and cooking for ourselves? on vacation? what?) but overall this is a great place to stay, the sort of thing AirB&B originally marketed itself as (they are listed on AirB&B, but we booked directly, which I think they much preferred). We've loved both the space and the chance to spend time with them!

Now Geoff is busy figuring out how to work the oven, to heat up our pies and chips, and I'm finally catching up to now here!

Our long-delayed front porch and mudroom project finally began construction while we've been away, and within a couple of days they notified us that they'd found dry rot and more asbestos. This house, I swear.

As God is my witness, I will have a mudroom this winter!

We managed to pack all our stuff up again and move on to Fishguard!

An uneventful last morning in Hay-on-Wye: we had breakfast, chatting again with Mary. Geoff meant to ask her about the local effects of Brexit (prefacing the question with "I know this might be a sensitive or political subject, if you don't want to talk about it I certainly understand"), but she misheard and thought he was asking about the local experience of COVID.

So that's what we ended up hearing about!

She said it wasn't so bad; there were a handful of deaths, mostly among the elderly (one man was a hundred and three), but not much sickness otherwise, although she did also mention the twenty-something son of a friend who was very ill and has never fully recovered. When they were under lockdown, the whole community divvied up responsibility for checking on people; she was responsible for one side of her street, and every day she would go knock on doors and check in, take grocery requests and deliver the groceries after the designated shopper had got them, and so on. (The nearest grocery store is actually in England, over the border, and they were under a different set of restrictions, but the people tasked with getting everyone's groceries just went anyway, because the alternative was to go ridiculously far to the nearest one in Wales, in Brecon.) In one row of houses inhabited mostly by older people, they would all sit out in their back gardens and chat across the fences. One day one of the women Mary was checking on didn't answer her door, and the neighbors said they hadn't seen her the previous day but since the weather had been bad they hadn't thought anything of it; but Mary figured, well, risk or no risk I've got to go in and check on her. So she went in, and the woman wasn't sick but had fallen quite badly; it sounded like she'd dislocated her knee! Mary knew some first aid from having worked with the Scouts and got it back in, and within two days the woman was basically fine.

Mary said that probably COVID hadn't been so bad there because it's so isolated and everyone is mostly spread out; I mean, yes there's a town, but it's not city-dense, and there's also plenty of people up on the farms who might see no one for a week at a time. She hadn't heard anything about the horrific death rates in the Montreal seniors' homes, or the refrigerated trucks outside the New York City hospitals, or (I assume) the huge pop-up hospitals in China, etc.; I got the sense that her local experience was just that the community put their heads down and got on with it. She at least, and her circle, weren't paying much attention to the larger situation. It was wonderful to hear about such solid and thorough community mutual care!

Then we packed up (paranoically checking for anything that might have rolled out of sight and be at risk of being left behind), shouldered our own huge hiking packs for the first time since landing at Heathrow, and walked ten minutes to a bus stop on the street below Hay Castle.

(I love my huge hiking pack, by the way. I can carry so much with, relatively speaking, so little effort, because it's well made and balanced. It's from Osprey; they make excellent gear.)

I had discovered by the merest fluke, about two weeks before we started this trip, that the bus we were depending on to get from Hay-on-Wye to the Hereford rail station had been cancelled and replaced by a different service, run by a different company, and leaving fifteen minutes earlier. Thank God I saw that! Although I probably would have discovered it anyway, if somewhat later, in the course of last-minute double-checking; there's several reasons I'm mostly in charge of logistics on our trips, but my tendency toward compulsive re-confirmation is certainly one of them. I'd even found a live bus tracker and checked on the previous day or two to get a sense of whether it tended to run on time, because it only runs every two hours and if we missed it we'd be in trouble. Anyway, thankfully it wasn't raining, and we got to the stop in plenty of time, had a pleasant wait (including chatting with another waiting passenger), and got on with no trouble.

We really weren't much of tourists in Hay-on-Wye. We wandered through the castle lawn but didn't pay to go inside; we wandered through bookshops but didn't explore the town otherwise; we strolled along the river path. I couldn't tell you a thing about its history. But we had a nice restful time there!

The bus ride to Hereford rail station was an hour long. The bus route began about a half hour before where we boarded, and there were six or eight people already on it when we arrived; I think three got off, and we were two of about eight getting on, at least half also with luggage, clearly traveling some distance/going on a trip. After that more and more people got on at the various stops in various small towns (interestingly, the bus also seemed to stop when waved down for a pickup, or when a passenger asked to get off, even when it wasn't a posted stop). But I don't think anyone got off again until we'd reached the outskirts of Hereford. I suppose people go into the big city for various things they can't get in the little towns, but have little reason to go from town to town, unless maybe they're visiting friends or something.

Then we had about an hour wait for a train to Fishguard, our next stop. The train was crowded and we couldn't sit together for a while, until there was a lot of passenger reshuffling at Cardiff (unsurprisingly) and we were able to move, and the overhead luggage rack didn't look wide enough for our big hiking packs even when there was enough space available for them lengthwise, so we had to have them at our feet and wedge our legs around them; poor Geoff started out sitting next to a woman who had one bag at her feet and another big one on the floor in front of his seat, so he had to put his big pack on his lap and I'm not sure he could even see around it! But once the train emptied out a bit we were able to be more comfortable. It was about a four-hour ride, with the usual gorgeous scenery of hills patchworked with fields and studded with cattle and sheep, with a few towns and industrial bits for variety, and some impressive tidal flats as we ran along the seaside for a while. Our host at our next B&B had texted (aha! Texting!) to confirm that he'd meet us at the station, and he said to sit on the left side of the train for some beautiful seascapes after Swansea, but I think the tide must have been out.

As we approached our stop, by which time the train had of course emptied out greatly (ours was the second to last on the line), a young woman (twenties?) sitting across from us asked if we were hiking, and we stuck up a conversation. She was coming to Fishguard to do rowing; she's on the Welsh team, she said! (She also said she was Australian; I guess rowing teams recruit from all over, like other sports teams?) We've been to Australia, though nowhere near where she was from, so we chatted about that a little; and she'd been to Canada, though nowhere near where we're from! So I said, "Well, if you're ever in Ontario, feel free to look us up!" -- I meant it mostly as a joke but it ended up serious, and Geoff gave her his card and she said she'd drop him an email with her contact info. I don't think she has, though; I mean, we only chatted for ten minutes. It was fun, though!

Then we arrived at our station, disembarked, and met our host Mike; he and his partner Christine run our B&B here. They have a working smallholding (mostly timber at this point, I think, plus a kitchen garden? Christine also keeps chickens, and we have six of their eggs in our wee fridge), and they rent out one self-contained attached apartment. Their home is a rebuilt and modernized (obviously) twelfth-century farmhouse, and our bit is at the end, what used to be the barn. (In the pictures on their website, we have the far right end: http://ffynnonclun.co.uk/index.htm.) The ground floor is a small room, but big glass double doors let in lots of light during the day, and there are some small windows as well. The floor is stone tiles, there's a loveseat and an armchair, a small dresser and a dropleaf table that we're just using as surfaces to put things on, a small wood stove that we're not using, and off of on one side of the very end is a bathroom with a shower stall with on-demand heater and -- blessed device -- a washing machine! We have done so much laundry. Paralleling the bathroom on the other side is a small but well-equipped kitchen; this is a self-catering B&B, they provide food but we have to cook it and clean up from it. As well as the eggs, the fridge is stocked with bacon, pork and apple sausages, cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, a loaf of homemade laverbread, butter, homemade apple-blackberry jam, and milk, and everything that isn't homemade comes from neighbors, pretty much. The milk isn't homogenized, which was fun to discover! I'm not sure I've ever even seen unhomogenized milk before. Apparently it's just not a thing around here. Mike did confirm that it's pasteurized, though, not raw. And the water comes direct from their own springs! (Filtered and UV-treated, delicious, but he did say not to drink it after it's sat for a day, like if you didn't empty your water bottle but just kept drinking the same water, because it's not chlorinated and things will eventually grow in it.)

The walls and ceiling of the room are whitewashed or plastered, and there are two huge tree trunks, bark still on them, embedded in the ceiling and running the length of the room, as ceiling beams. The walls are a good two feet thick. And between the doorways to the kitchen and the bath, a steep ladder leads up to the sleeping loft! There's a thick sturdy rope looped around each step of the ladder for handgrips (they are wide flat steps, not just rungs), and two birch tree trunks, each about as thick as Geoff's wrist, embedded from the loft floor to the (quite low by that time) ceiling, also for hanging on to as you ascend or descend! The booklet of info about the place warns, "No socks on the ladder!" and that is a rule we are holding to. There's a window and a skylight in the loft.

The fuses for the hob and oven, the washing machine, the on-demand shower, and the immersion heater for hot water from a tap each have to be switched on individually before they can be used, and you won't have hot water from the tap for an hour after you switch on the immersion heater (but if you're using the wood stove, that also heats the water tank, so you don't need the electric immersion heater). In some ways this is very rustic! On the other hand, on-demand hot water means an infinite supply, and there's (solar-powered) underfloor heating that can also be switched on (oooooooh so cozy), as well as things we take for granted now, like, obviously, wifi. Mike gave us a quick tour of all the switches and how to use everything. Also there's a washing machine but no dryer, and the weather didn't seem conducive to hanging laundry outside, so he helped us set up a big drying rack in his plastic-sheeted shed, which will be dry and warm, and which holds, as well as the usual collection of shed clutter, several tomato plants and also their big solar batteries.

He and Christine had been incredibly helpful and friendly in our correspondence ahead of time, with suggestions of things to see and do, offers of lifts, and so on, and while obviously this is a business for them, it's not like staying in a hotel or even a large multi-room B&B; it's very personal. So I brought them a gift: a half-liter jug of local maple syrup I picked up at a farmer's market before we left. That's part of the reason my bag has been so heavy; I've been hauling that around for a week! Mike and Christine (who came by as he was showing us around) seemed surprised and delighted to be given it, which is exactly the reaction you want to such a gift! (And Christine actually lived in Toronto for some years, many years ago, so she's familiar with it; years ago we brought some to someone in Australia, and they were like, ".....thanks? What do I do with it?" And then we were trying to explain that it can be used as sweet (e.g. on pancakes) or as savory (e.g. with pork) and that clearly did not compute.)

The B&B is up a long steep hill from town; Mike gave us a ride down to a pub he recommended for dinner, where Geoff had duck and I had fish pie, along with tasty local beers. Then Mike picked us up on his way home from picking up his son, who lives in Cardiff and was arriving for a visit; he'd intended to be on a train, but the train broke down and there was a lot of back and forth on plans, but eventually the train company put him in a taxi to the station and the timing worked out perfectly for Mike to fetch all three of us home.

We had a very cozy night in our loft, warm under a thick comforter and with the lasting warmth of the underfloor heating still radiating upward (stone holds heat!), and Geoff only bonked his head on the low-sloping ceiling once.

And that brings us up to the end of yesterday, but it's eight-thirty pm and I've got to stop writing things up for the evening. I will hope to write up today tomorrow: short version is, today was great.