What’s Happening – A quick round-up

by Alan Cole · Monday, July 29th, 2024

As we’ve just had a weekend I thought was time for a round-up of what’s been going on. I could probably write a separate blog post about each of these things but in reality each only needs a paragraph or two and I don’t have photos to accompany most of them so a quick catch-up post will have to suffice.

Royal Welsh Agricultural Show

Last week was a work week – aren’t they all? I did get out of the office on Wednesday to spend a day manning the Biomass Connect stand at the Royal Welsh Show. As well as chatting to people about biomass, I managed a little wander around to take a look at the funky goats and some impressive vegetables!

Sporting Weekends

Our weekends are at least our own, and seem to revolve around sport these days – both participating for me and watching for both of us. The last few weeks have been packed full thanks to the Tour de France, Wimbledon, various Grand Prix and now the Olympics! We don’t watch it avidly (well, I might be a little fanatical about the Tour de France!) but we do quite often find ourselves spending large portions of the day in front of the TV keeping up with it all.

We did have a local interest at the weekend though thanks to the fact that Josh Tarling was competing in the Olympic Time Trial event. He lives fairly locally and we’ve seen him grow up racing in the junior events aroudn here. He always competed in the Welsh Cyclo-Cross series while I was competing in the older age-groups. I’ve raced a few of the local Time Trials with him too, and there was a time (when he was a fair bit younger, and so was I) that I would beat him as well. That didn’t last long though, once he reached his teens he was soon getting faster than me and then there was no looking back. We said he was destined for big things when he was still quite a small, young lad but now he is not only competing on the biggest of all stages but is up there right at the pointy end too.

His Olympic debut didn’t go to plan. He had a puncture early on and had therefore lost some time slowing down, stopping, changing bikes and getting back up to speed again but even so he finished just outside of the medals in 4th place, just a couple of seconds off the bronze medal, and only 12 seconds off Silver which may have been attainable if it weren’t for the puncture. The fact that the three people ahead of him are HUGE names in cycling is impressive in itself.

It’s a shame he didn’t quite get a medal, but he’s still only 20 and there will be plenty to come I’m sure.

Rhys and Sarah’s Wedding

As well as sitting on the sofa watching sport we even had an evening out this weekend. Yep, I know, Alan and Anna going ‘out out’! I even had to buy some new clothes as anything that I had that wasn’t shorts and T-Shirt or technical clothing was at least 20 years old!

We headed off to Rhys and Sarah’s wedding reception on Friday evening. You may recall that I took Rhys on a ‘stag do’ to Mount Olympus recently and the big day had now arrived. They had got married the day before on Anglesey and now had a party at the Golf Club in Aberystwyth. I won’t go into details but I learned on Mount Olympus that Sarah really liked flamingoes and that they both had matching flamingo under-wear. Whilst shopping for clothes I came across a shirt with flamingoes on it so couldn’t resist. It went down well with both Rhys and Sarah commenting on it straight away. Anna has plenty of nice clothes so there were no excuses for a new outfit there. She wasn’t convinced that the shoes I picked for her were the right ones but everyone liked them and she reluctantly gave in to my superior style-sense!

Anna works with Srarah so there were lots of Anna’s work colleagues and friends there. I used to work with Rhys so there was something of a Sport & Exercise Department reunion too. It was good to see everyone and catch up. Congratulations Rhys & Sarah!

Campervanning

We also had what we probably be our final night in the campervan. Rather than get a taxi home or a hotel room in Aberystwyth we decided to sleep in the van at the Golf Club Car Park for the princely sum of £10. We’re trying to sell the camper as we just don’t use it enough so it could be the last time we do this. We didn’t get much sleep, but I don’t think that’s the fault of the camper.

Coming Home

The other big news is from Morgan. Having recently moved from the mountains in and around Banff to Tofino on the coast of Vancouver Island, he’s decided to head home for a while. Tofino is a little too quiet and remote for him we think. There were few people his age, he didn’t quite like the job he’s been doing there as much as his previous jobs and he’s feeling a little homesick. I wouldn’t go as far as to say he’s messing his parents, but he is heading home for a few months.

He has been enjoying the surfing at Tofino though, and managed to blag the free use of surfboards and wetsuits as soon as he arrived at his latest job there.

It’ll be good to see him as he’s been away for 9 months now and has done really well in Canada. It’s a shame in some ways as we did have a trip planned for September to visit him but those plans have now been scuppered. Fortunately we can cancel most of the bookings without losing any money, but it does mean we won’t be going on holiday to Canada. I had been looking forward to backpacking along the Juan de Fuca Trail with Morgan whilst there, but we won’t be doing that either now.

We’re not 100% sure of his longer term plans but he is hoping to head back out to Canada for the winter season again so we might be able to plan a trip for earlier next year. In the meantime, I’ll have to think of a different backpacking trip that I can do with him somewhere in Europe instead.