A Simple Life of Luxury

I’ve been wanting to ride at Llandegla for a while now so on our way back from Wrexham we stopped off at Llandegla and I finally had my chance.

As we pulled into the car park it looked really busy, people and bikes everywhere but I guess that was to be expected on a bank holiday weekend.

After a quick look around the shop and visitor centre we walked back up to the car in the overflow car park and got ready. I had planned to do the full red route and black route whilst Anna and Morgan were going around the 3 mile long Green route. Anna was going to walk with Morgan on his little balance bike.

We set off together and once on the trail it wasn’t nearly as busy as it looked I did pass quite a few people and there were often people stood around at the beginnings of certain sections or the tops of climbs but considering how full the car ark was it was nice out on the trail.

Overall it was a really good trail, nothing too technical and not too much climbing really so it didn’t take me as long as I expected. No knowing what was coming next meant that I took it easy all the way around. There are big signs as you approach the black sections warning you about the ‘extreme nature’ of the trail but for those worried about it then don’t, all of the trail is easily rideable as you can simply roll over any of the obstacles. obviously if you attack the course and go for big air off the jumps etc. then it could be a little more challenging but it is also possible to simply ride over them keeping both wheels firmly on the ground. (Which is pretty much what I did!).

Back at the car and Anna and Morgan had just returned too. They had fun, Anna enjoyed her walk and Morgan had got on really well on his bike. he doesn;t get chance to use it much so an hour on it is probably as much practice as he’s ever had so he improved all the way around and apparently came to an impressive skidding stop at the car!

Can’t wait until he’s a little older and all three of use can go for rides on the easier trails together.. I’ll have to convince Anna to go out on my bike, but that does at least mean I’ll be forced to treat myself to a brand new, shiny full-suspension bike!

On the way home we stopped off at the top of the highest road in Wales for a succesful geocache find.

Oh, and we finally got the video camera out of hibernation so here is a little clip of Morgan at Llandegla.

I noticed a new geocache hidden by Tortoiseshell appear about 5 miles from here yesterday morning. I was due to virtually drive past it later in the day so I left home a little earlier than needed and went out on an FTF (First to Find) mission.

It was a gorgeous day, the best so far this year with blue skies, blazing sunshine, temperatures in the low 20s and a decent Easterly breeze to keep me cool. From Bow Street I enjoyed a short walk up the hill and found the cache easily and surprise surprise I was the First to Find. Despite being a decent sized container there was nothing in it except for the logbook and pen and a geocoin. I took the geocoin and will hopefully move it on this weekend.

And, just for a change, not only did I remember to take my camera with me but I actually took some photos of typical Welsh summer scenery too.

The path to the cache

Oak leaves in summer

Coastal Gardening

All gardens have a unique set of parameters that will determine whether or not a particular plant will thrive, merely survive or perish. Most of these, such as the amount of sunlight, soil type and drainage are fairly obvious and well documented. Other equally important parameters include the amount of time, energy and money you have to spend on your plot.

Living our ‘Simple Life of Luxury‘ here on the west Wales coast means we are affected by all of these parameters. Whilst I don’t want to sound hard done by (as I wouldn’t change it for the world) we do seem to experience some extremes that make gardening here very challenging.

Over the next few weeks I shall be publishing articles here looking inn a little more detail at some of the issues affecting gardening on the coast and offering some potential solutions, for now though a brief overview.

First up, the socio-economic side of things. As a young working family, money and time can be a little tight. Again, I’m not complaining as it is all a matter of priority but at this stage, for us, family and work tend to come before gardening when it comes to use of our resources. I shall be looking at ways around this in a future article.

Climate: Frosts are fairly rare here but can catch us out. Wind is common. In fact it is ALWAYS an issue and I shall be looking at wind resistant plants and ways to minimise wind damage and frost damage too.

Soil and Drainage: Our soil is sand. No, not sandy, just sand. Pure, simple beach sand! Drainage is therefore extremely good, too good in fact and it may actually be affected by the height of the tide!

Salt-laden air is also an issue, and in case you missed it earlier, it is also very windy here all of the time.

Most gardeners will have to pick plants suited to the individual parameters in their garden, but usually these will be slight variations from a fairly standard mid point. This means that the choice of plants is wide and often, even if a plant isn’t perfectly suited to the conditions it will still survive. Here, the conditions are extreme, right at the edge of the scale as far as the various parameters are concerned so choice of plants that will actually survive is limited. Finding a variety of readily available plants is difficult and achieving your perfect garden near impossible. However, it is possible to mould the environment to a certain extent and with a few compromises here and there lots of patience surprising results can be attained.

I don’t claim to have achieved this goal yet, but I’m working on it. Progress is gradual (This isn’t Ground Force as I’m not Alan Titchmarsh and Anna certainly isn’t Charlie Dimmock!) but progress is being made and the coming articles will chart this progress highlight the successes and the failures and hopefully give inspiration.

At least we had a blank canvas to work with

Seaside Gardening

Related Articles

Articles in this series on coastal gardening:
Coastal Gardening - Wind

Continuing our anniversary day out we headed off to Llanerchaeron House near Aberaeron. This is a National Trust property so it isn’t cheap to get in but we decided that it was our anniversary so we may as well treat ourselves and have a look round, especially seeing as I’m into gardens at the moment anyway.

We wandered around the gardens and the lake and then had a look round the house. The house itself isn’t huge but it was interesting. We were actually more interested in the service areas out the back of the house rather than the luxurious living areas.

The gardens were nice too, if only we had a little more protection from the wind here. Of course, being a National Trust property they did try to get us to join. We would if there were more National Trust properties in the area, but a family membership is quite expensive and with nothing else to visit around here it just wouldn’t be worth it for us.

At least I remembered to take some photos for a change!

All in all a nice day out together.

Llanerchaeron Walled Gardens

Lake at Llanerchaeron

Formal Rose Garden

It was our wedding anniversary on Thursday so although we felt a little guilty about it we sent Morgan off to nursery as usual and had a day out together.

Typically I had come down with the dreaded lurgy the night before so wasn’t feeling great and the weather didn’t look too good to start with either. First we drove to Aberaeron but as it was pouring with rain decided to continue down the coast towards New Quay. We stopped off at a little garden centre in Llanart and had a wander round then dodged the showers in New Quay before heading off to the nearby Honey Farm for some lunch.

We hadn’t been to the honey farm before and although small it was a pleasant place to stop. We had a cream tea here and a little look around. They have a nice little picnic area, a tea room, an exhibition and a meadery. I discovered that the term ‘Honeymoon’ comes from the fact that honey was considered an aphrodisiac and was given to newlyweds for a lunar month after their wedding, hence the term honeymoon… Quite an appropriate thing to learn on our anniversary.

The weather had brightened up by now and it was actually a lovely day. The wind had picked up too so had I been feeling well enough I would have been dying to get out for a windsurf but as it was we headed back towards Aberaeron and off to Llanerchaeron House.

Phew, I’ve just climbed down from the telegraph pole after repairing the Borth and Ynyslas Weather Station. A few days ago the humidity sensor failed and was produing a 100% humidity reading despite the fact that this obviously wasn’t the case.

A qucik e-mail to McMurdo who are the UK distributors of Davis Instruments weather stations and the fault was diagnosed and a fix initiated. This was the 3rd temperature and humidity sensor to have failed and the new, upgraded digital versions wouldn’t work with the SIM (Sensor Interface Module) that I had. The answer therefore was to upgrade the SIM board to the new version so that I could also upgrade to the digital humidity sensor.

The parts arrived this morning and I’ve now changed them all over and everything seems (fingers crossed) to be back up and running and providing accurate weather data once again. It meant changin quite a bit of the guts of the station, all that is left of the original now is the rain gauge, anemometer cups and the solar panel. It’s now on its 4th temperature and humidity sensor and 3rd SIM board… The joys of running a live weather station!

As usual McMurdo were really helpful and helped me get the weather station back up and running in no time.

We’ve just had another action packed weekend here in rural mid Wales. Thanks to our local katabatic wind I managed to windsurf every day last week and although the wind wasn’t forecast to be great for the weekend, Ivor kept blowing and I managed to windsurf on Saturday and Sunday morning in the estuary at Ynyslas.

The flat water conditions do get a little boring after a while so I spiced things up trying silly tricks like body drags and carving 360’s. Both of these are fairly pointless tricks but fun to try and I guess blasting backwards and forwards across the estuary is fairly pointless in itself anyway.

After our Saturday morning windsurf session Steve and I headed off to the hills for a mountain biking session. We drove up the mountain road behind Talybont and parked on the forest road at the top of this, then headed down and around Angler’s Retreat and up my favourite little gulley before heading across to and down the chute, climbing back up to the top and then virtually retracing our tyre tracks back along the gulley in the opposite direction and back to the car. The route was only just over 12 miles, but it was all offroad and therefore fairly slow. I came off once on a tricky rocky step. I very nearly made it, but the last rock caught me out and i ended up on the floor with a sore arm and bruised ego. Later in the ride a tree got the better of me too. I tired to brush past it as it only looked like a little branch, but it was having none of it, spring back at me and sent me flying.

Steve faired worse then me though with quite a few off’s and once the cleat on his shoe broke meaning he couldn’t unclip from his pedals he went to pot and ended up upside down stuck under his abike a couple of times!

All good fun though and a good day of activities in Wales. Click here to see this route on ShareMyRoutes.com ere is the Summary view of the route topography along with me heart rate and speed.

I couldn’t resist another day out on my bike in the sunny weather, so after tidying up some loose ends as far as work was concerned I headed off on my bike and I hid a new geocache while I was out there. I won’t give too much away about its location but it provides lovely views over the Dyfi Estuary and hopefully the cache itself will prove just a little tricky for some people

It was inspired by the Assume Nothing series of Geocaches that we had fun with on our recent trip to the Isle of Man. It isn’t too tricky but may fix a few people if they don’t pay attention to the description. Lets just say the container is well camouflaged! Click here for the Assume Nothing Wales #1 (Bark) geoacache description.

We have a few more planned to make this into a little series of caches so this new one is just a starter. We’ve now hidden 17 geocaches in total, so hopefully this series will take us up to 20 hides before too long.

Sunday was hot and sunny again so I headed off to Nant-yr-Arian where there was a moutnain-bike demo being held. It was of course very busy there and there were lots of nice bikes about. I set off on my bike for a little circuit around part of the Pendam Trail and then went to the Specialised marquee to collect a lovely lightweight carbon fibre S-Works Epic for a test ride.

It certainly was a nice bike. £4000 worth of full suspension loveliness! I’ve never ridden a full suspension bike before and it certainly make s a difference on the downhill sections and over the bumps. The tricky, bumpy uphill sections were easier too as the suspension allows the back wheel to stay in contact with the ground better and therefore gives more traction. It felt a little slower on the uphill forest track sections, but in fact after looking at my GPS track it was actually a little faster uphill too, although much of that was probably due to the lighter weight of this expensive model.

Would I get one? Yes to full-suspension, but no to that particular model  as it isn’t perfect for the type of riding I do. Yes its very light, but I had to get off the bike to lockout the rear suspension and I’d rather be able to do that whilst riding along, either via a remote lever on the handlebars or on a bike where the rear-shock is within reach from the normal riding position. I’d probably be better off with one with a little more travel that the S-Works epic too. I quite like the look of the Specialised Stumpjumper or the Scott Genius… I’d better start saving my pennies!

Happy Humphrey, a prolific geocache hider on the Isle of Man certainly kept us busy on our recent trip to the Island, especially with a few attempts on his ‘Assume Nothing IOM’ series.

We should have started at the beginning really as we DNF’d (Did not Find) our first attempts on number 2 and number 6 in the series. However, on the last day of our trip we headed for the first in the series and found it without too many problems. So we then went back to Number 2 with the right frame of mind and also found it within seconds. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to go to any of the others but next time we are on the island we shall be in search of them again.

Inspired by the series we will hopefully be hiding some similar ‘Assume Nothing’ caches in Wales in the near future.