A Simple Life of Luxury

I just love living here in West Wales and working from home.

After seeing Anna and Morgan off to work / nursery I set to work at my computer, sitting in my office with my slippers on and a cup of coffee. I actually got quite a bit done this morning but as the wiond was blowing outside by 10am I stopped work and went windsurfing instead.

Licing this close to the bech means I can just walk across to the beach with my kit, so there is no time wasted driving miles and miles to the beach. After a few of hours windsurfing I went back home and did a little more work in my office with my slippers on before heading off to collect Morgan from nursery.

Morgan and I then headed off into the hills to look for a new geocache. I had hoped to be the first to find it, but was pipped at the post as someone had been there earlier in the day.

All in all a pretty productive day, working, playing on the beach and playing in the hills. What a perfect place to live.

We had a good day today. Morgan got up earlier than usual, so despite the clock going back we didn’t get any extra time in bed so were up and ready to go quite early. Perfect really as it meant we could attempt some of the new geocahces that have been hidden in and around Aberystwyth.

There are six new cahces, all part of the Rainbow Series (I’m assuming there will be a 7th soon). We did Blue, Indigo and Yellow, all of which are fairly close to the Rheidol Valley cycletrack. All were easy to find and the walk between them was flat and easy with the pushchair. As usua’ though they did take us to a few places we had never been before. I’d never walked along the Rheidol between Parc y Llyn and Glanyrafon for instance. I hadn’t missed anything too spectacular, but I now knoe there is a river monitoring station along there and it is always good to explore places that you pass all the time a little more thoroughly.

Morgan had a good time too, especially as we took a toy car from one of the cahces for him to play with.

After lunch and heading back home I was keen to do another cache so headed off to the slightly more challenging Moel Y Llyn cache. The walk to the location was actually quite strenuous, stright up through a forestry plantation and then across the hills to the summit of Moel y Llyn before descending a little to the lake and locating the cache. I found the cache itself without any trouble. For me it is nicer to have a difficult walk with some ‘proper’ navigating to get to the location and then find the actual hiding place easily than it is to know you are in the right place, but just not be able to find the actual cache.

The views were great despite the weather being a little overcast. My photos were terrible though so here are some other I took other than the views.

1. The Lake

2. The cache itself and my GPSr

Some fungi I saw on the way back down.

It’s that time of year again, the clock go back to GMT, the end of BST, the nights are darker, the mornings temporarily lighter and those that suffer from Seasonal Affective Diorder (SAD) start getting grumpy.

I actually quite like this time of year, once again things are all changing and those long evenings snuggled up in front of the fire (or wood-burning stove in our case) whilst storms are raging outside are really nice. As usual though I may have under-estimated the amount of wood we need, so I’ll be spending plenty of time on dry days collecting firewood from the beach.

Well, it happens to the best of us, eventually we get old, crumble and die, and Transit vans are no exception. This is espeically true when they live on the beach and are full of wet, salty windsurfing gear.

My Transit van has been rusting away quite rapidly for a while now and although the engine and everything else is still in perfect condition, the bodywork is beginning to look a little rough to say the least and the roof leaks in a few places! Time to get a new vehicle which is always something of a dilemma for me. I use it mainly as a vehicle to use for my gardening business and as storage for my windsurfing equipment. However, I’m more of a website designer these days and turning up to meet clients in a rusty old van doesn’t look too good (which is why I use Anna’s car for such meetings).

So, do I go for another van, and once again convert it to store kit in and have sleeping room and a stove etc. Or do I have another plan. At the moment I have another plan. I’ve decided I will be better off with a nicer, more family orientated car, which will also look better when visiting web design clients. It will have to be fairly big as I’ll still need to get the lawn-mower and such things in it, so I’m looking at either a 4×4 or a people carrier.

I will then need somewhere to store my windsurfing, surfing and kite-surfing equipment. A shed is the obvious choice, but sometimes I need to drive it to the beach, even if the beach is only 100 yds away, so a nice big trailer would be more sensible. I may even convert this in a similar fashion to my van, with a raised floor, a bed and a stove etc. OK, OK I know that sounds a bit like a caravan then, but it will be primarily for storage of my toys, and won’t be a caravan!!!

So thats the plan, a nice big trailer and a newish car, so far I’ve been looking at cars such as the Kia Sportage or Kia Sedona, simply because they seem like good value for money.

Knowing me though this will stay as a plan for a while until my rusty old transit completely gives up the will to live.

I’ve always been a bit of a fan of bonsai trees and used to have a really nice indoor bonsai tree until Robbie, our cat, ate it!

I’ve now got a new one though as a present for my duties as best man at Brad and Eloise’s wedding last weekend. The new tree is a fairly large fig (ficus) grown with a fairly complicated root/trunk system. It was a little overgrown when I got it so I have trimmed it back and hope to develop it into a nice looking specimen. It may have encouraged me to get a few more bonsai treees to.
My favourite bonsai trees are UK species grown to a fairly informal, natural looking style. Trouble with those is that we are just a little too exposed here to really grow such species outdoors. Although, the white polar and willow seems to grow pretty well in the garden so maybe I could make a few bonsai trees out of those. Similarly the pine trees grow OK here, but I’m not sure if I have the patience for those as they are pretty slow growing.

I guess if I start some now, it will give me an interest to fill my days when I’m old and grey… I know, I know I’m already old and grey!

So many things I’d like to do, and so little time to do it. I don’t know how people without any work to do manage to get bored, there’s just always so much to do. I live a fairly relaxed, free lifestyle where I decide what I do and when I do it, but still there just isn’t enough time to do half the things I want / need to do. Maybe the slow pace of growing bonsai trees will help to slow me down a little and teach me some patience.

It’s about time I caught up with some blogging here, but we have been so busy recently that writing about what we’ve been doing just gets in the way of DOING.

However, one thing we have been doing a little bit of is geocaching. For those of you who don’t know what it is, basically its an up to date version of a treasure hunt really. People hide containers all over the world, publish the coordinates of the whereabouts of these containers on the internet and then using a GPS receiver you can navigate your way to the location and find the cache. Most of these boxes have a few items in them and you can swap items if you wish. They also have a log book where you can place an entry to say that you found the geocache.

Put like that it doesn’t sound too exciting, but it is a good excuse for a walk and it tends to get you going a little off the beaten track to places you wouldn’t normally have gone. The nice thing is people tend to place the geocaches in places that they particularly like or that have some meaning to them.

Just the other weekend I had been on my brothers stag do near Llansteffan, before I went I had noticed that there was a geocache just a couple of miles down the road from where we were staying, so at the end of the weekend, instead of just jumping in the van and heading home, I went to look for the cache. It was located by the castle, and didn’t take me long to find it, but it did mean that I got to explore the castle and some of the coastline, something I wouldn’t have done if it weren’t for geocaching.

We quite often go out as a family looking for them too, which is nice as it gives us something to do together. OK, we could just go for a walk together, but geocaching simply gives us an excuse to do it.

Here are some photos from Llansteffan Castle.

Well, it was actually more fun than I had expected. Brad’s weding was a week away, I was Best man and so we had decided upon an activity weekend for the stag do. We were staying in a hostel and ‘Mexican Bar’ just outside of Carmarthen and had booked up to go paintballing and quad biking on the Saturday. We all arrived Friday evening and of course had a few beers. It was good to cacth up with some old friends, and with 12 of us altogether it was a nice sized group.

Saturday morning dawned, breakfast was consumed and we set off to go paintballing. I’ve never done it before, but it was fairly good fun and most people seemed to enjoy messing arond in the mud shooting each other. We obviously made Brad wear a pair of antlers with bells on and some high visibility stripes of tape to ensure it got shot plenty of times.

Jay was looking decidely worse for wear, due to ‘travel sickness’, much to everyones amusement.

After the paintballing we stopped off for lunch, but couldn’t persuade Jay to eat anything! then went Quad biking. Everyone really enjoyed this. Lots of mud again and the group was split into two. One group went around the trail which consisted of various obstacles whilst the other group sped around the track trying to clock up the fastest laps.

The three fastest from each group then went into a final race. I got the fastest lap but didn’t do too well in the race, which was won by Stuart.

The evenings festivities involved a trip into Carmarthen… Not the most exciting town in the world, but we made the most of it before heading back to the hostel for a few more drinks.

We did of course make use of some cling film at one point too… Standard Stag do practise these days!

I couldn’t help but laugh!  I know Al is getting on a bit these days but I was looking at some photos Eloise’s brother has posted on flickr.com and there is one of Al with Brad just before the ceremony and the title fo the photo is ‘Brad and father’!!!!  I know Al was nervous but I don’t think he is old enough to be Brad’s dad.

Lots of other photos here

http://www.flickr.com/groups/eloisebradwedding/pool/

Well, for once Alan really was the best man!…..at his brothers wedding last weekend.  I have to say he did a really good job and Brad had a good stag weekend the weekend before and got to the wedding in plenty of time.  Al was dreading the speech but when it came to it it went really well and even got a few laughs.  I’m sure Al is glad it’s all over and I certainly don’t envy him having to get up in front of all those people but on the day he scrubbed up well and I was really proud of him. (Don’t forget though that behind every best man is a better woman and I’ll have to keep reminding him that for a while yet!)

Morgan enjoyed himself as well and was fairly well behaved as well.

Of course we wish Brad and Eloise all the best for the future and a long and happy marriage. (photos to follow)