My Adventures in the UK - DAY 11 - by Anne Shier

(this narrative began from when I first landed in London on September 3, 2016)

Sunday September 11, 2016:

Today, we’re off to Carmarthen, Wales.  We’re taking a ferry boat from Newport, Wales to Rosslare, Ireland this afternoon.  This cruise takes three and a half hours.  It’s sunny out right now, but it may be a bit cool on the boat, if we go up on the open deck.

We stopped briefly at a village called Landavy (not spelt this way) for a bathroom break.  It costs twenty pence to enter a single, public, unisex toilet stall and when I got in, after waiting in a queue, and did my “thing” there, I couldn’t find the toilet flusher handle anywhere!  Weird!

A little later, we arrived at Carmarthen.  We were to be there for one and a half hours.  If we wanted to get lunch now we could, but food would also be available on the boat.  It is Sunday so most places are closed.  We found a coffee shop though that was open.

Wales is an amazingly beautiful place!  As in England, it’s lush and green, with rolling hills of farmland.  The roads in Wales are a bit more unusual though – simpler, single lane in each direction, winding, up and down hills, with forks in the road, and meandering through villages mostly.  There aren’t many cities in Wales.  This is a more countrified place.  There are sheep farms here for the most part, with some cattle farms.  It’s charming.

We’re still an hour away from the ferry boat launch.  We leave Carmarthen at 12:30 pm so we’ll get to the ferry boat launch by 1:30 pm.  The boat leaves by 2:30 pm.  The port authority in Newport, Wales requires that buses board the ferry at least three quarters of an hour before the boat leaves the dock.

Even though I feel tired a good part of the time while travelling, I am so glad I’m on this tour of Great Britain!  Who would’ve thought it was so beautiful?  We’re just finishing week #1 of the tour and we still have two and a half more weeks to go.

I have to go take some more pics now.  My cell phone should have more than enough room now that I’ve uploaded the three hundred and seventy pics in it onto my notebook computer and then erased the pics in my cell phone.  It’s a beautiful, sunny day out – it really couldn’t be better weather out there for picture taking!

The Welsh language is very strange, with double yy’s, w’s in the middle of words, and double ll’s, among other anomalies.  And, the sound of the single letters and double letters in Welsh is totally different from the way those same letters would sound in the English language.

Whenever you go from Wales or England to Ireland, you’re actually going to another country!  That means you might have to show your passport.  Ireland is not part of Great Britain and I was surprised to discover this fact.  Not only that, Ireland uses Euro-dollars, not pounds Sterling, so we will have to buy some Euros when we arrive in Ireland after the ferry boat docks in Rosslare.

copyright 2016 - Anne Shier