Hi Everyone,
Gwyn and I have spent the day indoors today, it has been raining cats and dogs here in London so hopefully the drought will be over! We planned on going to explore a canal not too far from where we live but hey ho, some chilled out time reading a book is also great. I forgot to mention I have found a new author whose books I am addicted to, Vince Flynn, who would have thought Lawrence would become a book worm.
As mentioned in our last update, over a month ago – apologies, my parents came out to the UK for a visit. They were greeted by typical wet and cold English weather on their arrival. Day one consisted of a tour into central London to see some of the sights, including a ride on the London Eye which my Mom amazingly enough managed, Leister Square & 10 Downing Street. The next day we hired an estate car and did a bit of a whistle stop road tour. Popping up to Birmingham to visit my Grandparents, then up to Manchester where we stayed the night with Gwyn’s Mom and Bronny. From there it was off to Wales, a short drive away.
Wales is a spectacular part of the UK, with scenic beauty something like that of the Natal midlands mixed with some Eastern Transvaal and a coastline. Lots of little rock-wall lined meandering roads, waterfalls, dense greenery, sheep, hills, and misty rain. The first 2 nights in Wales were spent in heart of Snowdonia National Park in a little town called Betws-y-Coed. Our guest house was situated on the banks of a crystal mountain stream, a fisherman’s dream! From Betws-y-Coed we explored northern Wales and all its little towns. Going up to the Isle of Anglessy where one can take a ferry over to Ireland from Holyhead, to Caernafon where we visited the medieval castle of King Edward the Longshanks (a hugely interesting world heritage site), through the Snowdonia National Park mountains, to one of the many slate mines and to a woollen mill to name a few of the highlights. We then travelled down the coast to Aberystwyth where we stayed on a dairy farm out in the country. The roads were a bit hairy with a couple ‘flip a coin’ moments but all good fun. From there we headed off to Hay-on-Wye, along the way stopping off in Brecon where Gwyn’s Grandfather was born, it was great for Gwyn to take a peak into her families roots. Hay-on-Wye was a wonderful little town, made famous by all the hundreds of second hand book shops, so you can imagine what we did here... From Hay we travelled up to Brum and stopped off at Iron Bridge to revisit some of my father’s childhood memories. That afternoon we visited my Dads aunt’s Jean and Joan who were really great, they did however think we were in dire need of sustenance…. I don’t think my stomach will be the same after all that food. The next two days were spent catching up with my Grandparents and touring my dads old haunts in Birmingham. Before we knew it we were back in London.
Two weeks later Mom & Dad caught the Virgin train from Birmingham to London, survived a trip in the underground and spent another couple days with us (One of the highlights was going to see ‘Guys and Dolls’ the musical with Patrick Swayze in the lead role). In between all of that, it was back to work. Gwyn had a busy couple of weeks because she interviewed for, and was offered another job. She will be leaving RWD on the 10th October and start with BSi (British Standards Institute) on the 11th October. She is taking a role as an HR Systems Executive, working with their SAP system amongst other things. She is very excited to be working in a team of HR professionals, so we will keep you posted on how it goes.
Other than that, we are rapidly heading for winter over here, but to brighten up our lives, we have booked two weekends away; one to Brussels to celebrate our anniversary, and another to Paris in November. Tessa and Bronwyn will be joining us in Paris, the excuse for the trip is to celebrate Bronwyn’s 18th birthday (can you believe it) and Gwyn’s third 25th Birthday (ha ha)….we are sure we will have a lot to report on from those.
Hope you are all keeping well…chat to you all soon.
Love
L&G
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