A Second Rainy Day In Wales

My second days in Wales I again experienced two more first for me. I was feeling a bit tired before our daily adventure and knowing I'd need some umph I broke down and drank my first cup of Nescafe instant coffee. As Lea says "I make a cup and pretend I'm drinking something other than coffee." It was supposed to rain but we ventured out anyway and headed to South Stack Lighthouse. Una, my host was gracious enough to drive us all to the lighthouse but she had to make two trips because there wasn't enough room in the car for all of us to ride at the same time. It decided to downpour for the start of our adventure but once we were good and soaked it didn't much matter and in the rain we practically had the whole place to ourselves. We left Dyllon with his grandmother because he wasn't much caring for the rain and then Noa, Sandy, Lea and myself embarked upon the 1,126 step adventure.

It was a windy walk down. The coming back was the hard part. I try not to think about it.

After we were nice and soggy the rain let up a little bit. We met nice man who was looking at puffins and chuffs and let us use his binoculars to look for some. He said "you can't come all this way and not see a puffin." He told us all about how puffins use old rabbit holes for their nest so they live underground which I thought was really interesting. I was scanning the hill rocks for a puffin and he said I'd know by the orange beak and orange feet and when I finally came across one I think I shrieked. It was really cool. Although with the age of media being so prevalent it is very easy to see a close up view of a puffin either on the tele or in books and so when you see one in real life I think you are robbed of how cool it really is. I was over joyed as having seen my first puffin in real life and gladly gave the binoculars over for everyone else to have a look. He also pointed out the chuffs which were all black and also had orange bills and orange beaks, although they looked totally different.

This gives you an idea of what we saw although our bird watching involved live birds that are much smaller. Chuff on the left, Puffin on the right.

Then we continued walking on down to the lighthouse. It was old really neat and the climb up the stairs was a little dizzying but we made it.

 The lens of the lighthouse.

Following our tour we went outside. The rain had stopped by now. The gulls were everywhere and there were a bunch of babies walking around. We saw one that wasn't very old and the shell was still near by.

Here the baby seagull is to the far right of the picture the white shell is in the center of the picture and Lea is getting a close up. The parents were close by and squawking quite loudly so we moved on.

Then we walked back up the hill and looked at the old WWII lookout that was up there because during the war they had to shut down the lighthouse but kept a watchful eye from the cliff.

The lookout from the front.

Here is a picture of the lighthouse from the lookout.

The Cliffs at South Stack and the rock on the left is where we saw the puffin and the chuffs.

After we went home we had a nice hot dinner of quiche and watched a movie. Noa and I ended up watching secondhand lions and doing our nails while the family watched Apollo 13. I packed up my bags and such to make leaving easier in the morning and headed to bed. It was a full day


FYI: The best luggage freshener is a bag of whole bean coffee.

The kicker about today was I actually had whole bean coffee but no way of making it, hence the Nescafé. When I was a Luketon Abi's they had a mortar and pestle and I ended up crushing the beans in that and makeing a make-shift cup of pressed coffee which was actually really good.