It’s the Aberystwyth Twin Peaks Challenge at the weekend. A challenging partly off-road running race covering two of Aberystwyth’s most famous landmarks: Constitution Hill (450ft) to the North of Aberystwyth and The Duke of Wellington monument on Pen Dinas (413ft) to the South. The race is organised by Aberystwyth Athletics club and is about 7 miles long.
Following on from the success of my recent sports event photo assignments at the Forest of Dean Enduro, Lake Vyrnwy Half Marathon and the Snowdonia Enduro, I’m planning to pop into Aberystwyth and take some photos of the Aberystwyth Twin peaks Race. Hopefully it will go as well as the previous events I’ve covered, although the mountain biking events are a little easier to cover (and sell photos from) than the running events.
As always, if you’re competing, look out for me on course and give me your best smile, or if you prefer grimace!
Check back here soon after the race for the Aberystwyth Twin Peaks Photo Album.
Aberystwyth Arts Centre Bell Tower
I’m not entirely sure what they’re doing to the Bell Tower at Aberystwyth Arts Centre but it is currently clad in an impressive looking column of scaffolding. Do you know what they’re doing?
I’d love to get up there to see the views and get some ‘almost aerial’ shots of Aberystwyth, the University Campus and the Arts Centre. Somehow I doubt that Health & Safety will allow it and I don’t quite have the nerve to ask, but as well as providing an excellent photo opportunity it would be quite an adrenalin rush too as it’s pretty high!
Should I ask and see if I can get permission to do it?
Those of you who know Aberystwyth will know that it isn’t always the most up to date place, but we had promised Morgan we’d take him 10 pin bowling. Unbelievable there is a choice of two places to go, one in Llanbadarn that I’d been to a couple of times before and one in the holiday park at Clararch.
None of them are what you would call state-of-the-art facilities. The bowling place in Llanbadarn has about 10 lanes and although I haven’t been there for a few years, it was the only bowling centre I’d ever seen where the pins are held up by bits of string. That was until yesterday as the 4 lanes at Clarach also have pins held up by bits of string.
It took us (and the staff) a while to get the lanes working properly. First, after putting our money in the slots nothing happened. Once that was fixed we had a couple of goes and then realised that the balls weren’t being returned so it took a while to get that fixed as well. By now the place was filling up a little and despite the fact that it was only about 10am we had a couple of drunks in the lane next to us. They weren’t being abusive or anything so it didn’t really matter.
All was going well, I’d had a bad start because I missed my first two balls because the system was tricked into thinking I had had them by one of the staff passing under the sensor whilst trying to fix something, but it looked as though it was all working now and Morgan was enjoying himself. I was trying to catch up with the scores when I noticed that the computer hadn’t added my last score of 9 to my total… Oh, well it wasn’t really important and after the initial system failures it was pretty much what we expected. Anna was next up while I was still complaining about the lack of updates to my scores. She got 6 pins down and the computer subtracted 2 from her score!! Excellent, not adding mine on was annoying when it started taking points off it was just funny.
I wouldn’t recommend coming to Aberystwyth to go 10-pin bowling!!
Bowling at Clarach
Ten Pin Bowling
After taking Morgan for a swimming lesson yesterday morning, in which he didn’t do as asked as usual, we heaed off for a walk in Penglais Woods where there was a special craft day going on.
We had a nice little walk along the footpath from the entrance opposite the university and then in a beech clearing found a few people doing various crafts. One guy, a tree surgeon, was demonstrating tree climbing, there were a few people turning wood on tradition lathes and a a guy with some things made of wood. There was also the opportunity to decorate your own bowl using Raku. Raku is a pottery technique that has it’s origins in 16th century Japan, the firing proceeds at a rapid pace with the wares reaching temperature in as short a cycle as 15-20 minutes, follwed by raipd cooling. This compares to the more traditional method of firing that lasts 8-24 hours followed by cooling phase that lasts 12-24 hours. Good news for us as it meant we could get hold of the bowl we had decorated without a huge wait.
Unfortunately there weren’t really any instructions and we didn’t really know what we were doing. Before getting there we knew nothing about Raku, there weren’t any finished products to give you an idea opf what could be achieved and all of the bowls coming out completed looked pretty much the same. Black with the odd blob of colour here and there. The blues and greens didn’t really show up too well, the copper colour which produced a metallic glaze was good though, so we were glad we’d added some of that to our bowl!
Aberystwyth Panorama
Morgan then made a little wooden pendant with a print of a beech tree on it and we wandered off through the woods looking for more things. We did come across a man making an owl sculpture with a chain saw, and had a nice view out over Aberystwyth, but nothing else. I think there were some stall down in Aberystwyth itself, but we didn’t find them and the promised childrens games and organised sessions that were meant to take place never seemed to materialise. It was still a nice walk in the woods though and Morgan enjoyed making his little pendant and hitting logs with a stick!
Woodland Printing
Beech Trees
Chainsaw Sculpture
Morgan with a cone
Saturday was the day of the Agricultural Show in Aberystwyth. When I was little we always went to the show each year (I’m not sure why) but I think I used to enjoy them, so since the weather was so nice and Alan had a days mountain biking planned, Morgan and I decided to go along and see what all the fuss was about.
We didn’t get there until about lunchtime as Morgan had a swimming lesson first thing. A bit on the expensive side to get in, £6 for me and £4 for Morgan (even though it says £2 on the website!). I’m not sure what Morgan was expecting but I think it was some other kind of ‘show’ (at the theatre or something) as I think he was a little disappointed that we were in a field with lots of people milling around. The disappointment was soon overcome when he spotted the bouncy castle right by the car park and after a quick go on that we set off to have a look around. I knew it wouldn’t take us long once Morgan announced that he didn’t want to go and look at the horses or any of the other animals for that matter! Anyway, tractors were to save me and he was soon engrossed in a display of old tractors and steam engines (one was rescued from the bottom of a reservoir on the Isle of Man) and an ice-cream.
We were also supposed to be on the lookout for 3D shapes to take pictures of for Morgan’s homework and apart form the loud speakers (cones) and the steam-engines with cylinders for funnels we weren’t very successful.
I did manage to convince him to go and have a look at the sheep and cows and on the way back tot he car, via the steam engines again we bumped into Kai with his mum and dad. Thrilled to have someone to play with Morgan was suddenly more than happy to go and look at the sheep again before pestering to go back on the bouncy castle. He and Kai (and Kai’s mum) seemed to enjoy themselves and after a quick picnic (where Moragn who has never eater a sausage in his life decided to eat all of Kai’s) we popped into the chicken and duck tent. Morgan was more interested in the different sized and coloured eggs than the actually chickens and then we had another go on the bouncy castle!
I was planning on taking Morgan to the Royal Welsh Show this year but unless they’ve got a bouncy castle there I don’t think it’ll be worth it!
We still had a nice day and after a quick trip to Morrison’s to stock upon BBQ food we went home to wait for Alan and Steve and a well deserved BBQ for tea.
Photos below were taken by Morgan!
Tractor
Another Tractor
Lots of Tractors!
A Shiny Tractor
Bouncy Castle
It was Sol’s(climbing in the adjacent photo) birthday at the weekend and Morgan was invited to his party at the climbing wall in Aberystwyth. We had never been to it before and although fairly small (I’d call it a bouldering wall) it was nice in there and Morgan seemed to enjoy it.
Morgan never really got very high and didn’t have a go on the rope with the harness, but we’ll probably take him back soon as it was good fun and is a good way to burn off some of his energy! I had a little climb too and having not climbed for several years it was a bit of a work-out for me as well!
Anna of course didn’t have a go but sat there with the other mums having a natter and did a terrible job with the photography!! At least she took some photos I guess which is more than I would have done.
The first stage of the aber-cachers travel bug race ended yesterday. The idea was to see how far the travel bugs could travel by moving from geocache to geocache over the course of a year. Here are the final results:
The Little Welsh Cache 11907.9 Miles
Skateboarding Sarah Miles11744.2
Jennie.m’s AberCachers race TB 11158.5 Miles
Forces-of-Nature Al – Travel Bug Race 6174.6 Miles
~*Tinkerbell*~ 2792.8 Miles
Snowboarding Dave 2340.6 Miles
Samurai Vanya – Travel Bug Race 1759.1 Miles
Samurai Dan – Travel Bug Race 1046.8 Miles
Forces-of-Nature Morgan – Travel Bug Race 570.9 Miles
Tortoiseshell’s Aberystwyth race travelbug 550.1 Miles
Red Kites Abercachers Racer Bug 111.9 Miles
The second stage of the race now begins… A race back to a geocache in Aberystwyth.. May the best bug win!
