Bye Bye Summer
Well, it feels as though summer is coming to an end. There’s only a few days left of the school holidays, we’ve just had a fairly damp August Bank Holiday weekend and there are only 120 days until Christmas! We didn’t let the change in the weather dampen our spirits though and managed some family time together over the weekend.
Fast Bike Ride
Saturday started with a bike ride for me. Nothing too long as we had other things planned later in the day so I set off early for a quick ride to Machynlleth and then out around the Tal y Llyn Loop. I started of quite quickly and just kept the pressure on all the way around for what ended up being quite a hard ride. My average heart rate was just over 150bpm, much higher than anything I’ve done recently. It wasn’t a record breaking time as I’m fat and unfit at the moment, but it wasn’t bad either thanks to the effort I put in.
Once back at home we did a few chores around the house and had some lunch before heading off into Aberystwyth. I made a quick hive inspection at one of our out Apiaries on the way.
We had a surprise planned for Morgan later in the day so had to get him into Aberystwyth to do some other things. All he was worried about though was getting home in time to watch the first in the new series of Doctor Who. He was also quite keen to do a geocache today in order to maintain our consecutive days geocaching streak. So, once in Aberystwyth we walked along the prom and out to the cliffs below Constitution Hill where there was an Earth Cache we had yet to do.
Earth Caches
An Earth Cache is a special geological location people can visit to learn about a unique feature of the Earth. Earth Cache pages include a set of educational notes along with coordinates. Visitors to Earth Caches can see how our planet has been shaped by geological processes, how we manage its resources and how scientists gather evidence. Typically, to log an Earth Cache, you will have to provide answers to questions by observing the geological location. Of course, as geologists ourselves, Anna and I usually find these quite easy and fairly basic, but it’s always a good opportunity to teach Morgan some geology and as usual they tend to take us to interesting places.
This particular Earth Cache had us looking at a hole in the cliffs formed by the erosion of the Aberystwyth Turbidite sequences along a fault plane. We clambered over the rocks, looked at and measured the hole, climbed through it, looked at the rock sequences, talked about folds, faults and turbidites and looked in some rock pools too.
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- Morgan in Hole
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- Aberystwyth Turbidites
We logged the cache and then walked along the prom to the pier where we popped in for a quick go on the 2p cascade machines. Morgan had 50p to spend which he lost. I only had 2p but managed to come away with 30p in my pocket – gambling success!
We then wandered up to the castle to do another Earth Cache. This one was looking at the standing stones in the castle, but it had been annoying me for a while thanks to the terrible (and very inaccurate) description of sandstones in the cache description. These caches are supposed to be educational so it’s annoying when the details are incorrect, and the description of sandstone here is just plain wrong! It didn’t get any better when we started looking at the stones and answering the questions. The cache description had the annoyingly incorrect description of a sandstone, and a description of a slate and then asked us which of these two rock types the standing stones were made of. The first standing stone we looked at was undoubtedly made of granite – an igneous rock, completely different to a sandstone or slate. The next was a limestone complete with some nice Crinoid Ossicle fossils and oyster fossils… Again, certainly not a sandstone or a slate! There was another limestone, some shales and finally a slate and a sandstone, but each stone was different and very few of them fell into any of the categories listed in the cache description.
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- Crinoid Ossicles
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- Granite
We answered the rest of the questions though and obviously told the cache owner what each of the rock types were when we sent him our answers. We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he was trying to test us!
Dinner and a Surprise
We then walked though town and headed off to Baravin where we had a table booked for dinner. Baravin do alternative pizza’s. Morgan had a simple ham pizza, Anna had a Fig and Goats Cheese Pizza whereas I had a breakfast pizza complete with bacon, sausages, fried egg and black pudding. Very nice it was too. Morgan was now getting a little worried about not getting home in time for Doctor Who though, so we made him suffer a little more by heading to the shop for some snacks to eat whilst watching the TV and then deciding to go to the Arts Centre for an after dinner coffee. He wasn’t so keen on that, but I said to him that once he was there he might want to stay there. He disagreed so I decided to have a bet with him. I bet the whole 30p I had won earlier that once we were there he would want to stay. He knew that wouldn’t be the case though as he wanted to get home to watch Doctor Who so was quite happy with the little wager.
He looked a little confused when we took the snacks in with us to the Arts Centre but didn’t seem to mind. Once we had our coffees we asked him to look up what was on at the Arts Centre today – He searched for it on the Internet and discovered that there was a special showing of the first episode of the new Doctor Who series on at the cinema, complete with extra special introductory scenes and a live feed from a Q&A session with the new Doctor. The penny dropped! We showed him that we had tickets for it and I asked him if he wanted to stay or not. He decided that the question was unfair, but in the end duly gave me the 30p we had bet! Yes, another gambling success for me today!
Anna and I aren’t into Doctor Who so I think we missed a few of the intricacies of the plot, but it was OK, and Morgan was obviously thrilled to be watching it on the big screen and to be seeing the extras. The cinema was full, and full with quite an eclectic mix of people too. Who’d have thought such a mix of people would have been Doctor Who fans?
Sunday Cinema Visit
Sunday started with a bike ride again for me, just a short ride up over the hill to Pendam, down to Ponterwyd and back. Nothing too hard this time though so all at a steady pace through then rain. Although once back at home it hadn’t been raining there. It seemed as though the rain was confined to exactly where I had been.
After some more chores and lunch at home we once again headed off to Aberystwyth ready to watch Planes 2 and a special showing of some animations that the Animation Club that Morgan attends have been creating. It’s only a short screening of them, but we get two free tickets to a film at the cinema because of it which gives us an excuse for a family trip to the cinema. The film was pretty good though.
We then popped down to do a quick geocache close to the University campus just to keep our consecutive days geocaching record going and then headed home for a lazy evening.
A Trip to Barmouth
Fieldtrip
Monday was looking like the greyest and wettest of the Bank Holiday weekend days, but we had planned a trip to Barmouth so after a slow start headed off into the rain. First stop was a little church in Cardeon where we had some tasks to do for Anna’s Mum. Various gravestones needed photographing and measuring. Rocktypes of the headstones had to be identified and we had to scour the churchyard for other related graves. It was just like a proper field trip complete with drizzle, water proof coats, soggy notebooks, compass-clinometers and tape measures! I even managed to fall over on the slippery stones – just after warning Anna that they were slippery – much to her amusement.
Geocaching in Barmouth
Once we were certain that we had all the information we could gather, we headed into Barmouth for some lunch. By now Morgan was keen to do a geocache and wanted to do the one up at the top of the hill above Barmouth slabs that had a terrain rating of 5. Anna didn’t really fancy that though so his next mission was a cache called Mermaid of the Mawddach that had lots of favourite points and was situated on a little tidal island in the Mawddach estuary. This involved a walk across the bridge and a short trudge across the sands at low tide. The rain held off even if it was pretty windy on the bridge and we soon retrieved the cache.
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- Mawddach
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- Mermaids?
We then stopped at the remains of a little limekiln to find another quick cache where there was also a modern Trilobite sculpture. My plan from here was to cycle home whilst Anna and Morgan took the car. I climbed into my cycling kit just as the heavens opened. It was now properly raining, absolutely pouring down, and with a strong SE wind blowing I was likely to have a very wet headwind all the way home.
As wet as it gets
That’s exactly what I did have. It poured with rain almost all the way. I had a strong headwind into Dolgellau, followed by a long slog up the hill towards the Tal y Llyn pass. Somehow it managed to get even wetter over the pass, so the descent to Tal y Llyn was taken with some caution. Amazingly it then rained even more heavily as I climbed up to and through Corris. By the time I was on he descent to Machnylleth I couldn’t have been any wetter, but the rain did at least ease a little and by the time I was at Ynyslas it had stopped. Anna and Morgan were there and had been for about an hour, so dinner was almost ready. I dried off in the shower, ate my dinner and then we had a relaxed evening at home.
Our consecutive days geocaching streak was now up to 20 days, but with work and holiday club tomorrow and an ever dwindling number of easy local caches to do, keeping it up is getting more difficult. That was until a new cache popped up in Bow Street. Plans were made to find it in on the way in to work in the morning. Not only would this take us up to 21 days, but there was a chance of a First to Find as well. I also spent the evening working on some puzzle caches so by the end of the evening had two more caches to find in Aberystwyth. We might just be able to keep the streak going for a few more days yet.
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Love the trick you played on Morgan! I like the sound of the fig and goats cheese pizza.
Yep, it worked a treat… Mind you I think we would have preferred to have been extracting honey like you were, but our bees aren’t quite ready for us to take it off them yet. I don’t think we’ll have enough to be burning out any extractor motors either!
Al.
Busy week end! We had a pottery lesson and made a pot each, then had lunch in Cadbury garden centre