A Simple Life of Luxury

Those of you who have been keeping up with our Simple Life of Luxury will know that we have been enjoying a spot of geocaching lately. So, as we are of to visit family in Gloucestershire in the run up to Christmas we looked up some caches in that area and have been tempted by a pretty difficult cache. Geocaches are rated ona a scale from 1-5 for their difficulty and on a similar scale for the terrain. The cache we are going to attempt gets 5 stars for both, making it one of the most difficult in the UK. The Wildcat Geocache is listed as one of the hardest but also one of the best geocaches in the UK.

Stating here that we are going to attempt it probably means we are doomed to failure, but we are going to give it go, and WON”T be giving away any clues. The cache itself consists of three virtual caches where you can find numbers to give you the co-ordinates of a fourth cache. The fourth cache provides you with coordinates for the 5th and final cache, for which you need to hire some specialist equipment to get to.

Of course, to make things a little more difficult you need to solve various cryptic clues to find the first three virtual cahces, and just to add to the fun most of these cryptic clues are in French! We think we know where the first virtual cache is, and have the numbers required from it. We think we know where the 2nd and 3rd virutal caches are too, although we could be completely wrong.

We even have a hunch where the final cache may be and therefor have an idea what the specialist equipment could be… But that really is just a hunch. As soon as we get the chance we shall investigate these locations to see if we are on the right tracks… It should be an enjoyable challenge, and who knows we may even find the cache at the end of it.

Bow Street, a few miles SE of us was hit by a Tornado last night…Apparently there were winds of up to 130 mph, trees were uprooted, steel portacabins lifted up and thrown onto childrens playgrounds, caravans overturned, chimney stacks blown off and a roof pretty badly damaged.

According to John Mason a local expert in Tornado’s it was a Category 4 tornado, which is quite strong for this country.
Luckily it struck in the early hours of the morning so no one was injured, but thousands of pounds wrth of damage have been caused.

My weather station here in Ynyslas was too far away to even register anything strange as Tornado’s are very localised phenomena, but as long as it didn’t damage anything it would have been interesting to see if the anenmoeter could have coped with the winds.

More info and pictures on the BBC.

I’ve had another busy weekend, whilst Anna, Morgan and Pat sheltered from the worst of the weather at home. Saturday was certainlly windy and rainy at times, and Steve nad I had a good days windsurfing here at Ynyslas.

As Anna’s mum (Pat) is here, we then made the most of the opportunity of some baby-sitting and went out for a meal on Saturday night. The nearby Rhydypennau Inn has recently been refurnished so we decided to try it out. Steve, Dave, Sarah, Anna and I all headed out and had a nice meal there. It was certainly much better than last time we went there, so no doubt we will return.

Sunday wasn’t as windy as Saturday and wasn’t forecast to be either so Steve and I headed of to Cadair Idris for some geocaching. We walked up the Minfford Path to Llyn Cau and found the first cache on the shores of the lake, before scaling the gulley at the NW of the cwm. Steve managed to scare himself a little on the climb, but was OK once out onto the path at the top. We then headed off into the winds and clouds of the summit where we took a bit of time to find the next cache. We did find it but it was pretty cold and inhospitable up there so we didn’t hang around for long.

From there we headed across the ridge to Moel Mynydd and our third cache of the day before descending a path there back to the car. All in all a good if exhausting day in the hills.

There are plenty of other geocaches on Cadair though so I’ll probably be retunring soon, especially now that I have some new walking boots!

Just a quick photo that I took whilst up Constitution Hill in Aberystwyth today.

I’m sure I must have mentioned this elsewhere before, but one of the downsides to living here on the edge of Wales is the quality of the utility services. Don’t get me wrong I wouldn’t live anywhere else and the problems and shortfalls we face are a small price to pay. We don’t really live ‘out in the sticks’ so probably have it better than quite a few people around here, but I also realise that many people reading this (especially those from a city) won’t believe that there are many households out here who don’t have running water, mains drains, gas etc.

Quite a few people that I know get their water from a spring as they don’t have mains, and some of those springs dry up in the summer leaving them no option but to buy bottled water. Mains drains is another issue and many mnay houses out here don’t have mains drains but instead rely on septic tanks or cesspools. We’re lucky as we do actually have mains water coming into the house. Our problem however is the lack of mains drains, and in our case (which is unusual) the complete lack of any drains at all. This of course means that there is nowhere for out mains water to go so we can’t really use it.
We get by using buckets for washing up and washing and have hired a portaloo as the all important toilet. It lives in the back garden and gets emptied most weeks. It is actually quite nice having it there in the summer when we are sitting in the garden, but not so pleasant when nature calls in the early hours of a cold, wet and windy february morning! We have tried our best to get either mains drains or install a sewage treatment plant of our own, but Building Control seem to put hurdles in our way whener we start getting anywhere… Hopefully next year we will get something sorted (I’m sure we said the same last year).

So what of gas, electricity, and the phone? Well, there is no mains gas, no questions asked there just isn’t! We do have electricity, but it can be temperamental at times. We get fairly frequent power cuts, and every night at 9pm the power seems to be ‘turned down’ a little as all the lights dim. Last night things went a little weird too (which is what prompted me to write this). At around 3am lots of our appliances started beeping at us, so I got up to investigate. As I switched the lights on they would come on for a second then go out.. The night light in a socket in the hall was flashing, the phones, microwave and other things were constantly beeping, the computers had switched themselves off, but were trying to start up. Even stranger, some sockets would power certain applianes but not others, and some appliances would work in one socket but not another… We didn’t know what was going on, but it seemed as though there just wasn’t enough ‘juice’ so things were trying to switch themselves on but wouldn’t quite be able to, so would just keep trying over and over again hence the annoying and constant beeping!

In the end we phoned our electricity suppliers and got a man on the other end of the phone who was obviously asleep, but once we woke him up he did inform us that there was a low voltage problem that they were trying to fix. At least we knew it wasn’t a problem with our wiring or something so could go back to bed.. It was now 4am, not the best time to go back to bed knowing that Morgan would wake us up at 5.30am!

Still, at least when he did wake us up the electricity was off completely which is a much nicer situation than ’sort of a little bit on’! In a way it is almost relaxing and there isn’t too much that goes wrong due to a power cut. The weather station stops updating to the internet, but the station itself and data logger have battery backups so no data is actually lost, and as long as the freezer doesn’t defrost it isn’t too bad.
Phones… Well, we do have a phone line and a broadband connection, but they too can be a little less than perfect, If it is windy (which it usually is) then the phones can be quite crackly and although the Broadband is supposed to be 2MB we don’t get much more than 1MB speeds through it…. When we first got this I thought it would be plenty, but faster would be better.

Overall our utilities aren’t great, but the views, lack of pollution, lack of traffic, fresh air, sea and mountains more than make up for them. I wouldn’t change that for the world, but wouldn’t say no to some improvements to the utilities either… Why can’t we have the best of both worlds??

As mentioned elsewhere my rusty old transit van has just about reached it last legs, so it is time for a new car. We therefore spent Saturday morning looking around showrooms in Aberystwyth. Trouble is I want it all, I need something big enough to fit lots of stuff in, reliable enough to ot breakdown but I’m also getting older and wnat a little bit of comfort too.

The original plan was somethng like a Kia Sportage  as you can get them fairly cheaply. After comparing that to a Freelander I’m was pretty much swayed to pay a little more just to get the extra luxury and styling of something else. The Freelander Sport I tried was really nice. it looked good on the inside and out, the driving position was good, I even liked the wing mirrors (I hate poxy little wing mirrirs!). But I phoned Brad (my brother) who owns a garage and asked him what he thought of the Freelander and he told to not to touch it as ‘it has a k-series engine which is useless’.

Well. I take his advice on such things as it is likely to be Brad that I turn to when things need servicing/fixing so that looks as though the Freelander is off my list of options. The Kia Sorento looks nice but I can’t afford them, so I’m now looking towards a Mitsubishi Shogun. I have to try one first, but that looks to be my main option now.

Originally I was going to get it in conjunction with a large trailer for my windsurfing kit, but I’m moving away from that idea as it is very rarely that I need to go anywhere with my windsurfing kit and if we are going to the Isle of Man ir anywhere else on holiday I can always take some stuff on a roof rack… That will of course mean we need a shed to store my windsurfing kit in!

Phew… All of this just to replace a rusty old transit van!!

For those of you who don’t check the photo galleries too often but like to see photos of Morgan, I’ve just uploaded  a selection of photos from a walk Morgan and I had on the beach here in Borth yesterday. Click here for Morgans photo gallery.

You just can’t beat a nice early morning walk along the beach.

It is exactly one year since I set up the Borth Weather Station and as usual at this time of year we have been experiencing some weather, so it was quite fitting that this morning we broke one of the ‘all time’ records as far as the weather station is concerned with a maximum gust of 45 knots. Up until this morning we had hit 44.2 knots on a few occasions,  but 45 knots is now the new record. No doubt that will be beaten at some point.

For those who are interested the weather station uploads live information to the internet on a number of weather parameters every minute, 24 hours a day. Historical data for each day is also stored and presented in a number of different formats, with averages, extremes and planty of graphs and charts for you to view what the weather has been up to. Follow this link for info on how to access the live and historical weather data from Borth and Ynyslas.

I’ve been ill this week, so instead of spending my spare time out windsurfing and general enjoying the Welsh coast and countryside I’ve been keeping warm and snug at home and have spent some time playing with the image generating capabilities of PHP. I decided to build a ’stats sticker’ that members of my Forces-of-Nature website could use to place on their websites or blogs to show off to their visitors how often they get out on the water and how stoked they are!.

Here it is just so that I can test it. It will of course update itself whenever I update my windsurf diary entries on Forces-of-Nature.

I could of course have built it as a normal HTML based iFrame but I decided to use PHP to get the required info from the Forces-of-Nature database and then generate a jpeg image from that info as it should be easier for other people to insert the jpeg image into their existing website. It also gave me a chance to learn something new too which is always good.