Wales #1of3

The Welsh countryside is beautiful and very green. There are flocks of sheep and herds of cattle all over the place. We drove through a National Park, but there were some areas with no trees. Some of the towns in Wales are entertaining, and some are not, but the people are all very, very friendly.

People are making a big fuss about the use, or lack of use, of the Welsh language. We see signs in two languages, and the local spelling for Wales is Cymru. A new TV station is going to speak Welsh or else, according to the locals. A young girl we met, is studying the Welsh language in school. Her parents don’t know the language, but her grandparents do. They are all determined the language will live.

We visited a furniture factory where they built furniture of excellent quality—solid oak and ash—the price was high, but the furniture was very solidly built. Emmy saw a sweater she liked very much, displayed in a store window. We waited until the store opened then found it was a knitting store, so she bought the pattern. Wanna bet how soon we will see the actual sweater—we never even found the pattern when we got home.

Among the problems of driving on the “wrong” side of the road, is that each morning we must figure how to do it all over again. Also, in this area there are high hedgerows (10 to 15 ft. high) and high stone fences, and the roads are very narrow. In a vehicle with left hand drive, the driver is against the left side of the road, right alongside the hedgerows and stone walls, and has no chance to see far enough around a sharp curve to see what is happening down the road. The passenger must remember it’s her job to see what’s around that next curve.

Gorgeous magenta colored hydrangeas are blooming in Wales. There are many old stone houses, some with slate roofs, in this very woodsy area. Today is meat day, and the butcher’s truck is going door to door We watched three sheep dogs drive a flock of sheep down the road. The dogs are amazing, and were really in control of the situation.

Tenby is a pretty little seaside resort town, with a beautiful sandy beach, a little island off the coast, a stone wall, with five little stone arches at the entrance gate to the town. My brother Paul was stationed here, Thanksgiving day 1943, during WW II, prior to landing on Normandy Beach, in July 1944.