Go West
Following our recent escape to The Newt, I was receptive to further ideas for a short break and clearly my Hero was open to persuasion, for when I snipped a small corner of the Times and mentioned fish and chips, his answer was to follow up the link and book a couple of nights! After all, it had been around forty years since we were last in St Davids and this time of the year would be the perfect place to explore out of season.
We chose not to take the motorway, but to drive through the Brecon Beacons, enjoying the fine weather and looking forward to the trip.
Though there are disadvantages here and there,
it does mean I have time to read the road signs - or more accurately, find the words I can read!
We had identified somewhere we might stop for lunch, but sadly, when we got there it looked far from open for business and we continued on our way. But surely, we’d checked before we left home? I quickly got out my phone and looked again - “open Weds - Sun, 12 onwards”. It was around 12.30pm now, so perhaps we’d been mistaken? We turned around and went back - the chalkboard on the door said “Open - come on in and close the door behind you please” Phew! Except it was locked!
Grrr! Now we were hungry and irritated!
Thankfully, we’d not gone much further along our route when we spotted a sign for the Beacons Farm Shop where the warmest of welcomes immediately confirmed that the other place had done us a favour! Sampling the most delicious venison cottage pies it proved hard to resist something more elaborate than bacon butties.
A couple of hours later we’d made it through Carmarthen and Haverfordwest, each of them prompting memories. My Hero had lived in Haverfordwest for a short time as a teenager but I was on less familiar territory. So much so, I was surprised when over the brow of the hill, the sea suddenly appeared!
This was where my geography was tested. I knew where St Davids is, knew we were heading in more or less a straight line but I just couldn’t get my head around the shape of the coastline to the south around there. So when we dropped down into Newgale, the appearance of St Brides Bay right there in front of me came as a surprise.
It wasn’t much further to St Davids and with clear blue skies overhead, we decided to leave checking into the hotel in favour of getting a breath of fresh air first. Caerfai Bay was just five minutes from our home for the next couple of nights and on this beautiful afternoon was a glorious place to be.
But once again, it tested my geography! Working out just what we were looking at proved difficult. There was land on the far horizon but without some visual aid I was stuck and our phone signal wasn’t strong enough to power Google maps in detail. The answer is on the map above - it’s the other side of St Brides Bay and we were looking towards St Brides and Skomer Island, but the need of a good map would be the story of my time in Pembrokeshire.
The Twr y Felin Hotel, when we got there, proved to be the perfect place to stay, especially since we’d been able to take advantage of the special deals on offer, one of which was dinner in the restaurant.
More about the hotel’s art collection in a later post, but enjoying dinner in the company of Shirley, Tom and Cerys was a great way to kick off our short break in Wales.
The fish and chips that brought us here would have to wait!
