Celtic crusades … part one

For once in our lives, we began at home. Home having been to this point Wales: land where the minstrels are honoured and free. Druids, bards, poets, Gavin & Stacey, among the world’s best rugby players, singers and drinkers, among the world’s worst footie players and dress sense in large towns on a Saturday night … and without doubt some of the most underrated and unexploited scenery on the planet. Great for sheep. Crap at promoting itself and providing for tourists. Great for ducks – it seems to never stop raining, with horizontal blatty rain from October to March and plain old vertical rain from April to September. But we love it.

Little England, otherwise known as Pembrokeshire, is where we originally wanted to live when we came back to the Land of Our Fathers over ten years before. Then we moved east away from the coast along the A40 until we could afford it. Pembrokeshire is heartbreakingly pretty, with gorgeous beaches, rolling green hills, strange rock formations covered in lichen, lovely little towns and shockingly high real estate prices. It boasts dolphins, seals, seabirds of various kind (I’ve never been big on birds, sorry, but understand they’re REALLY great and some are quite rare) and wild horses that obligingly graze the stunning coast path. If Wales did anything like a good a job on tourism development and promotion as England, the coast of west Wales would be as overrun as Cornwall or the Lake District from May to December. Of course, said tourists wouldn’t be able to find a loo, a tea shop or ice cream when they got to the beauty spots … but as residents we kind of appreciate the fact we’re so crap at pulling in the punters. Its easy to have an entire bay to yourself or walk for many miles along headlands in grateful solitude. And you can almost always find somewhere to camp.

 Being nervous newbies to our 29 foot home, we didn’t stray too far off the beaten track on our first outing. Our friends Judith and Andrew picked out a farm campsite near Carew, run – quirkily enough – by a priest. Father Paul was incredibly helpful and accommodating, measuring his pitches to make sure we could fit in there, always around and always looking after us all … except on Sundays when he had four sermons to deliver. This place was everything I like in camping. No rules, no bother, no crowds, no lashings of tacky entertainment. Cheap as chips. Of course, that had its downsides like no internet, shop or phone signal and being in the middle of nowhere, but that was a small price to pay. We had four great days with our friends, with the kids entertaining each other royally during the day and us adults entertaining each other for long reminiscing evenings over a few beers. We had visits from more friends and lots of laughing. Of course, it wasn’t a holiday – but the start of a new life. This meant Joe worked a lot, and took our little car Huwy to have his braces and hair extensions done – so we could tow him and he could carry bikes. The kids visited great places and then did homework on them. With work commitments we ended up staying a week, which was too long. Judith and Andrew had had to return to normal life, the weather turned and we had incredibly itchy feet. But, we also had lovely days with my sister and her family and my mum. I’m not big on goodbyes, so it was always “see you soon”. Because our nearest and dearest are welcome to come and stay with us anywhere, anytime. We are not disappearing off the face of the earth, after all. We’re just moving across it for quite a while. Plus, we’d be in the British Isles for at least the next six weeks. It didn’t feel like goodbye.