Adam:  We’ve headed west into Wales; rough, rugged country.  Land of the unusually strong affinity for sheep, incomprehensibly saliva-soaked place names and a chip on the shoulder about the English.

We had to skip out on Wales on our first pass through the UK due to the car delays, so we were especially pleased to be able to come back here and hit a couple of places that we had originally planned to visit prior to leaving Atlanta.

The most important to us (i.e. the kids) was to visit an actual coal mine and to go down and see how miners did their thing 100 years ago.

Brenda:  We’re currently near Wales, England. Today we’re going to tour a coal mine, which was recommended as a great kid activity. We only have a couple days left on our trip…. we fly home on July 20, this Friday morning.

We’ve been having a fantastic time, except for our car issue.  That was incredibly stressful and no fun at all.

We’re really happy to be back in England.  We spent too much time in France (again!), but it’s such a big country you really can’t avoid driving through it if you want to see all the other places.  The people aren’t rude or snooty (like the stereotype) but are overall just unhelpful and provide really poor service.  If it only happened in one or two places, you can chalk it up to just one bad hotel, or one poorly serviced restaurant … but it happened in practically ALL of the places we tried to do business, including grocery stores.  It’s impossible to ignore the pattern.  France is like a diamond studded turd: some of their things are really worth seeing, but you have to put up with digging through a bunch of shit to find them.

Anyway, out of all the countries we visited, England is by far our favorite.  When we finally got back, it felt almost like coming home.  We just love it here.  The weather sucks, traffic is terrible, and things are unbearably expensive, but it’s just fantastic and charming in spite of all that.  I’m ready to go home now (we’ve been gone 6 weeks, which seems like forever!) but I’m going to be sad to leave England.  Almost all my ancestors came from here, so maybe it’s a genetic pull.

Holden getting geared up at the Pwll Mawr Coal Mine near Blaenavon.

Testing the lights before we headed down.  They are quite serious about gases and sparks. As such, we had to strip down of any electronic items (no watch, no car key fob, no cell phone and no camera) before descending.  Nothing with a battery that could ignite and kill us all.

It was a great tour.  300 feet down where the coal was mined by hand for over 100 years. Kids started working there at age 6 and stayed through adulthood until they met with early, untimely deaths.

They also used horses down in the mines to pull the coal carts.  For the horses, it was a one-way trip down in the “cage” (what they called the elevator).  Horses were sent down and then worked until they died; dead horses were buried in unused tunnels.  Because of the horses living down there, rats were a big problem.  They handled the rats with Jack Russell terriers.  The dogs had a better deal … since they were small enough to be carried, they got to ride up with the miners at the end of the day and go home.

Lots and lots of sheet in Wales … pretty much everywhere you look.

The view at our hotel.

Running around the ruins of Aberystwyth Castle.  Construction started in 1277.    The first cannons in England were fired here on this fort during one of the wars where the English were fighting against the separate, independent Welsh kings.

Aberystwyth is like many of the coastal towns we’ve visited in England … cold, windy and a little run down.  They always look like they would have been fantastic places during Victorian times, but have ridden a gradual, downhill slope since then.  They seem tired, quiet, and almost bereft of anyone under the age of 40.

Making good on my “rain check” for some arcade action.

Cold, windy, bleak and rather depressing.