On the last full day we started slow. My sister was still recovering a bit from the day before, and I had forgot to start the bread machine the previous evening. As soon as I woke up I started it, but we couldn't really leave until we had bread for lunch, and that would be 11:15. So we just pootled a bit! And there's nothing wrong with that. But when the bread was ready we made lunch. And we decided to take it easy. We went for the walk near Ysbyty Ifan Marieke had earlier rejected because the terrain was not rugged enough. But after yesterday, absence of ruggedness was exactly what we needed! And I hadn't had a problem with the weather, but my feet were feeling the incessant walking so I didn't mind an easy day.
We drove to the village; I had only once driven through it, and I had never stopped. It is quite scenic. But we were out of the village in no time. And we were also rained on in no time! Quite a serious shower came over, but we could see it was only a shower. We had had a late start, so I was hungry and I think even my sister was, so as soon as the rain abated and we found a place with some shelter, we sat down for lunch.
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| Ysbyty Ifan |
After lunch we continued our way. The landscape became emptier and emptier. And we were on some old agricultural road, which would eventually turn into a path, but we didn't even get that far. We didn't want to spend too much time anyway, and at some point just before the location we had picked for turning back, the path was quite seriously flooded, so we called it a day. We just walked back and got back to Bethesda.
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| The path |
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| Scenic signpost and sister |
We had decided we were going to make pizza that night, so Marieke went to the shop while I got the bread machine ready to make the dough. And then we ate pizza. A fine result for a day if you ask me!
The last day was only a half day. My sister would get a train around lunchtime. She suggested we spend the time before she would have to leave in the garden. I thought it was an excellent idea! I had told her before she arrived that I was of a mind to drag her into the garden and make her tell me how I could make it look better. She has an eye for that and I don't. And she had plenty to say. And changing your garden design is a lot of work, and I am not going to follow all her directions, but even the advice I will take to heart will take me a while. But there is time! She already started to change my raised bed with mainly heather; that now has a bigger focus on heather. One of her main peeves was that I have too many different things in each bed, and that makes it fragmented and busy. So now that bed has some low shrub on the left and heather on the right and that's it!
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| New and improved: heather bed |
In the meantime I was sawing some big branches off my willow tree as they were getting in the way. And the bigger bits of wood were cut to size to become firewood in a few years.
She didn't get around to do anything practical with the other beds. It was time to make a packed lunch and leave! So I brought her to the railway station. Where her train promptly was delayed. By more than the margin she had to change in Landudno Junction! That made me nervous. She was more composed. But in the end the train came and she got on it. Her visit had come to an end! It had been good. We had properly caught up about all sorts of things. And we did some lovely walks as a bonus. I hope it won't be three years before we see each other again…
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| There she goes |
(By the way; everything worked out with trains and planes in the end!)
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