More than a wet weekend in Wales
⬅ previous ⬆intro next ➡Day 4 ~ May 18 ~ Treehouse (near Machynlleth)
Happy Birthday Amanda!This is why we're here, remember, it was her birthday present from her sisters last year.
Let me show you some more of our luxurious surroundings this morning...
When nature calls...
...You will answer with wood chippings!
The toilet is quite an interesting piece of engineering (this will be TMI for some, sorry) called a “urine-diverting dry toilet”. Learn more at Wikipedia.
Best hope it's not raining when you need to go, because while it's a short walk to get here, it's still an uncovered walk.
Getting to the shower is not a short walk, it's an expedition! Observe the video below.
What fun! Very pretty in the bluebells, though, you have to agree.
Right, showered and dressed, it's time to head out. We're going to visit Amanda's friend and former colleague Carolyn and her husband Peter for lunch, as they live less than an hour's drive from here, near Aberystwyth.
On the way, we stop at the town of Machynlleth. Wikipedia renders the name in IPA as [maˈχənɬɛθ], which some of you will immediately recognise as being very un-English in having a stressed schwa vowel! (Not that the [χ] and particularly the [ɬ] consonants are very English either, but somehow they don't feel quite so odd to me.)
It's the biggest town in the immediate locality and it does have a fair bit of history, but we can't honestly claim we warm to the place much. It all seems just a little bit run-down.
Not a very exciting building, but the plaque reads, “THIS BUILDING WAS THE LOCATION OF LAURA ASHLEY'S FIRST SHOP”.
Fame!
Having allowed ourselves a bit more time than it turns out we need for Machynlleth, we get to Aberystwyth a little early, so we stop for a look around the waterfront.
Quite an attractive little harbour.
Looking back, we can see the war memorial and the ruins of the castle. Most of Aberystwyth is relatively modern, but the castle was originally built in the 13th century, though not much remains now.
Carolyn was a properly lawyer like Amanda, which is how they know each other. What advice would she give a client contemplating buying a very pretty and old (17th century) Grade-II listed house? “DON'T DO IT!” Oh well.
After lunch we go for a stroll, and find ourselves popping out pretty much where we turned back when walking earlier.
Back to the tree house, and Gu-vu holds the cards. Now look closely: the second card from the left is Gu-vu performing the same duty on Amanda's birthday last year in Portugal!
Her present from me is a bat detector. That is to say, a little gadget that plugs into her phone and picks up the ultrasonic sonar chirps of bats. It translates them into something audible to humans, displays a sonogram – effectively a ‘picture’ of the chirp – and if you have phone signal or wifi (which we don't), will identify the bat species by comparing with a database. We are sure we have lots of bats around here, but it's a bit wet to venture out so we have a quick play and then it's back indoors.
You can read more about it in this review.
Talking of Portugal, tonight's dinner is going to be based on some sardines we bought there! (The ‘1965’ is just a label, they're not actually approaching pension age.) If you've read the Portuguese blog, you'll know we bought a box of various tinned fish products, and we've been eating them over the course of the year and enjoyed them greatly. This one has been saved, of course, specifically for today.
As you may deduce from some of the other ingredients visible, I'm going to make a vaguely Mediterranean fishy ratatouille-ish dish, but we don't seem to have any more pictures of me cooking or the final result, so you're just going to have to take my word for it that it was yummy.
(Not that you'd be able to tell from a picture anyway. Hmm...)
We are very cosy with our wood burner, and now it's bedtime.
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