If I can’t post these on the right day then what will become of me? Potty attendant clerk is all I deserve.

This was taken in Abersoch in Wales.  Lovely lovely place, and somehow the sun always shines there.  Anypoop, I just kinda like this photo ‘cos the boat was freaking bizarre looking and the kid I guess helps the composition?  Dunno mate.

Back from my little family holiday in Somerset.

I was really blown away by how lovely the region is both aesthetically and in terms of friendliness.  The countryside there is very welcoming towards walkers, well set up paths, styles and all that.  They have a hilly area of country there called the Quantock’s, which offers up some great views.

We went to many pubs and none were trashy, all well looked after with the friendliest publicans you will find anywhere.  Best of all, every single person in Somerset seems to love dogs, every pub allowed them in, even in the restaurant areas, no where up north seems to let you bring a dog anywhere near.  Even the pubs which served expensive food welcomed Eddie with open arms, really really good food too, a sample of dishes I had in these places would be…  Monkfish, John Dory, Scallops, Rabbit and lamb (with a historically creamy parsnip mash!), um I didn’t all that in one evening lol. All with Eddie at my feet.

Downside would be that Somerset seems to have the worst mobile data reception ever. Earlier in the year we stayed in Wales and the cottage had wi-fi, thing is I don’t think it was intended for us, but it was unencrypted so I can’t really complain that the cottage in Somerset had no such luxury.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get a decent data connection from my mobile either (I hook my mobile to my iBook when away to get proper internet).  In Wales I could get a really solid connection via GPRS and at good speeds, I could download all sorts at a good 40KB’s.  In Somerset I couldn’t get above 5KB’s (is that WAP speed?) and it would only ever stay connected for about 5 minutes.   Hence why I never bothered to blog.

Actually, I would have hoped to have the photo’s all done but I went a bit mad with the camera.  I’ve got 576 photos to master and thats with the out-of-focus, blurred, overexposed etc deleted.

Uh oh.

Last Wednesday we went on the Rheilffordd Ffestiniog Railway.

It’s a darling little steam train which takes you around some pretty Welsh scenery between Porthmadog and Blaenau Ffestiniog, taking you past Snowdon and all that nonsense.

Took a job load of photo’s on it, some of which I’ve uploaded to Flickr. Many were taken sitting in the train past a window whilst it was moving, thinking hey, it may not work so well but I may as well take some. To my surprise a lot of them look great! I took them at ISO 400 and 400th of a second shutter, the sunny day helped out a lot.

Photo’s from the train. Photo’s of the wales holiday.

On Tuesday we visited the home of The Prisoner; Portmeirion.

Awesomely bizarre place, it was certainly the natural choice for setting the classic 60’s sci-fi paranoia series.  The architect Clough Williams-Ellis started building the place in 1925, it’s supposed to be a slice of Italy in wales, but it was built at something like 3 quarter scale which is probably why it feels so bizarre.

I can’t help thinking that they are trying to play down the The Prisoner connection because, although there is a prisoner souvenir store, it is incredibly lame, it’s mostly badly printed T-Shirts with slogans from the show and some boxes of Butter-Scotch with a grab from the show on the front.  Strangely, there was a wall of Dr Who things in one corner.  Why?

Again, weather was loooovely.  More photo’s of Portmeirion, More photo’s of Wales.

We’ve come on holiday by mistake.  The family, Eddie and I.  To Wales, rented a cottage affair on a farm near Pwllheli.

Nice house, discovered unencrypted Wi-Fi in the kitchen and it’s pretty fast.  It isn’t a feature of the house so I can only guess that the owners who live next door haven’t thought to protect it.  Is it naughty of me to be using it?  No one else lives nearby so it must be theirs.

We’re super shocked by the weather.  With the UK suffering a depression over our weather system this summer, meaning endless rain and no sun we had pretty much written off the idea of enjoy some.  But by jove, Wales is really sunny and the sun is beating down some major heat monsters all over us.

The second day of the trip we went to Abersoch, really nice coastal town, quite chocolate-boxy and not at all spoiled.  Worth visiting.  Had a surprise celebrity sighting, we were siting outside a pub enjoying a sip of ale when we noticed some girl who looked an awful lot like whoever plays Violet in Coronation Street.  Just presuming it was some spit, didn’t think much of it.  Then when we got up to leave a guy asked us if we were leaving, so they could have the table, and only after we were walking away did we turn around and notice that it was the the guy who plays Jamie in the same soap.  Crazy, they were with some other guy in a bit of a perm, dunno who that was.  Oh yeah, he drank magners, and they both smoked.  Random facts there.  Tried a paparazzi number on them but I felt embarrassed so only caught a blurry mug shot of jamie

Uploaded a number of photo’s to flickr, and I’m gonna be uploading more throughout the remainder of the week.