Just chillin' in front of 600 years of history. No biggie.
Sue and Imogen:
After visiting the Abbey, we beelined to a gorgrous, river-side pub where we feasted on jacket potatos... Mother, it's worth a plane ticket to get your mitts on a British baked potato slathered in baked beans.
The next day we went to the Royal Welsh Show - a gigantic agricultural fair, which in addition to having all the standard things -- horse pulls,tractors for sale, warm homemade doughnuts, odd-looking people -- also had sheep dog trials, quad bike jumping (over a tractor, yo!), fishing demonstrations (not as exciting as you'd think) and flyovers from Second World War Hurricanes (terrifying).
To get to the Show you bomb down increasingly smaller Welsh roads through increasingly more beautiful Welsh valleys until you come to the giant inexplicable traffic jam in the midst of idyllic sheep-y-ness... Then you wait for 45 minutes, inching your way forward at a snail's pace and become exceedingly grateful for your inappropriate luxury sedan that has air conditioning, automatic transmission and excellent radio reception.
You probably haven't heard, because it's just been a quiet, local affair, but Kate and William had their royal baby - a boy. Healthy baby is wonderful, of course, but I think we can all agree that we were secretly hoping for a girl. British queens are generally good value -- long reigning, sometimes ass-kicking, grandmotherly at the end -- much better than the jug eared, insane, wives' head chop-offing men... Victoria could have eased up on the colonialism and not perpetuated genocide in Ireland, but she had all those dozens of children to give birth to, as well as those fat ankles, so she was probably not even paying attention to the small stuff....
Where was I -- of yes, well, that baby was born, so there has been some highly entertaining British radio coverage of it all. BBC 4 is very ambivalent about it, which is enjoyable. On one hand, every news report offers breathless updates --the baby's grandparent's think he's "beautiful"!! -- but then the actual BBC journalists talking about it make various snide, snarky remarks about the fuss. Best of both worlds, really.
Anyhoots, the wait to get into the Show was worth it because it was gorgeous day and there were a million fun things for the kidlets to do and also for lunch we had something called "Roast Hog on a Bun" which is roasted pork, stuffing, applesauce and gravy all crammed into a soft white bread roll. My word, it was tasty.
Some pics from the Show:
Violet was born to be wild
An air ambulance to play in - luckily no one in rural Wales needed an airlift yesterday, because I'm fairly sure these two would have spent their time fighting over the headphones, zapping their patients with Spiderman webs and frantically pushing the big red button on the dashboard.
Sheep dog demonstrations:
Babe couldn't have done it better.
Sheep Dog:
Some kind of wiley...
In addition to the sheep dogs, there were some pretty intense sheep shearing competitions:
This photo sadly doesn't do justice to the enjoyably brawny, strapping young men who apparently make the finals in a Welsh sheep shearing competition
(or maybe that's just my Australian bias coming out...)
A fake cow to practice milking techniques:
There were also some weird things.
For instance, this enormous table of prize eggs:
All carefully judged for colour, heft and overall eggy-ness
In addition to standard petting-zoo animals, like baby goats and bunnies, they also, wonderfully, had owls. Here's Imogen (pink hat), Owen and Violet getting their mitts on that adorable little owl:
More disturbing was this ad for Whiteface Hill Sheep society:
Not sure the slogan will really catch on outside of Wales.
Come on! It's called "Tubby" for God's sake!
Finally, the highlight of the show for Violet... An out of the way payphone her incredible spidey sense zeroed in on:
A three and a half year old in heaven
1 comment:
Love it all!
st
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