Visits to towns-with-hyphenated-names!

On Delle's second weekend here, we set off for south Wales on Thursday night and stayed the next two nights with a friend, Gwen, who lives in Monmouthshire. (Gwen is the one whose parents we had morning tea with when we were in Scotland with Jim and Jenny in May.) Here are the highlights from our two days in the west...

Friday: Delle, Ben and I spent the day exploring Hay-on-Wye, "the town of books" - a small town just on the Welsh side of the England-Wales border where there are about 40 bookshops... including one in a castle, one where every book costs £1, and one called "Murder and Mayhem" dedicated to mystery stories! We only purchased a few books between us, but could have bought many more had we not had the issue of luggage space to keep in mind! It was an extremely pleasant day spent with our noses in books most of the time. :) We definitely recommend a visit to Hay-on-Wye if you get a chance!!



Friday night: We went out for a delicious dinner in Usk with Gwen and her friends Martin, Tania and Stephen. Had one of those delightfully small-world-ish experiences whereby we discovered during the course of the conversation that Tania's step-aunt had just become my aunt...!!

Saturday morning: The three of us visited Warwick Castle, which was absolutely huge and amazing. We only had a couple of hours, but enjoyed some awesome views from the castle towers, walked through the furnished rooms, and were scared silly by a ridiculous ghost tour! We also watched a trebuchet being prepared and fired, and I got my head stuck in helmet - the type worn by a knight, not a cyclist...



Saturday afternoon: We went to Shakespeare's comedy "A Midsummer Night's Dream", performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, the town where Shakespeare was born. Delle and I got bargain £5 tickets, but Ben was... er, too mature to qualify for such tickets... so his seat cost four times and much and was in a worse location than ours! But the play was absolutely hilarious and we all thoroughly enjoyed it.



Later Saturday afternoon: After the play, we wandered around Stratford-upon-Avon, a gorgeous town with lots of old Tudor buildings, a style I absolutely adore. We also visited Shakespeare's grave, which is inside a church, and drove past the cottage where he was born.



That evening, we drove home to the strains of P.G. Wodehouse's "The Girl in Blue" (one of Delle's Hay-on-Wye acquisitions) as performed by Delle and I. :P We spent Sunday back in our own neck of the woods - the start of our last week in our flat and our last week of work. By the following Sunday we were in Italy, but I'll save that for the next entry! Goodnight!