Frantic catch-up

Because i'm not getting regular access to the internet i'm having a bit of trouble making this a proper, comprehensive travel-log, and i do apologise for that. I'm going to have to do a brief summary as time is a bit short before i have to hop back into the car.

We visited Tintern Abbey, which is the ruined remains of an abbey from at least 700 years ago. It is very close to the England/Wales border, but it was the first spot where i first began to get a strong feeling of Welsh culture, as the Welsh Heritage organisation run the site of the abbey ruins and are conscientious about preserving Welsh culture - they have a similar language program for Welsh as New Zealand has for Maori - every sign, every notice, every important document is duplicated in English and Welsh, right down to the "Slow" signs on the road. The ruins were impressive, especially as they were set in the pristine Wye Valley which made the place feel sheltered and incredibly peaceful.

We drove on up the Wye Valley and ended up staying just outside Hay-on-Wye. We spent almost the whole next day in Hay sampling the thing that it is world famous for - second hand bookshops. Yes, Hay is a village whose economy is built almost exclusively around second hand book tourism. It has over 35 book shops, and i believe i visited at least 25 of them. Some of them were glorious - large amounts of books, well laid out and organised. Some of them were horrible - poor stock (i had the impression that some stores just bought 2nd hand books by the truckload regardless of content), poorly laid out and organised (i mean really, it's not enough just to have fiction and non-fiction, you could try and alphabetise them or something), and a few treated their books so badly that it actually made me angry. I have fought back an almost overwhelming urge to apply for a work visa to start or take over a bookstore here, but i can definitely imagine coming back (they do a famous Writers' Festival which will begin in a week or two). For the record, i was very restrained and only bought 2 books (a crappy horror novel and a biography of Clive Barker). Dad bought 6 books, and if i had known he was going to throw restraint to the winds i would have bought a few extra as well.

The next day was fairly non-descript - we had stayed the night at some super-snobby golf club (i felt so oppressed - they had rules excluding me from the restaurant because i was wearing jeans) but took off fairly early on, looked at another cathedral whose name escapes me in some town which presumably the cathedral shared, and then ended up spending the night in another town whose name escapes me. This is what happens when i write a blog without my notes. Ah well - suffice to say that neither of those towns set my world on fire.