Can you believe I was actually on holiday 5 weeks ago now? I have had these photos loaded and ready to go since we got back but it's just been non-stop with lots of summery events booked in and I haven't felt in the right head space to start typing up the posts for my holiday recap. As always I'm very behind!
That's ok though because it's nice to go back and look through these photos again, reminding myself of happy times with family and adventure. I use my blog often as a diary to keep track of my annual seasonal activities or to remember certain projects in more detail, or to remind myself of certain details of places visited.
My holiday posts have been split up into different days because it's easier to write/read in bitesize chunks so first up we have our travel stop off destination, Chirk Castle!
Day One::
We have been to Chirk before on a previous holiday (I can even direct you to a blog post about it!) and funnily enough I took almost the exact same photograph then as the one above with the door. I do really like that door.
There are lots more photographs of the castle in that last post linked above, and I've even written down some of the researched history for you to read so I won't go into it here. We didn't walk around the whole thing, just a quick stop around the castle for lunch and back out again.
It was a dismal day to travel; awful rain for most of the motorway journey and then still very drizzly and grey walking around the castle. The benefit of being a National Trust member though is that you've always got places to stop off at when on a long journey that you don't have to pay extra for and they pretty much guarantee parking, coffee, toilets and interesting history! Currently lots of properties are selling cloth badges of their locations which we collect and stitch (or at least, I stitch) onto our camp blankets. Even Baby F has one and he's already clocked up several NT badges!
We all walked around the very posh castle rooms, and Baby F bottom shuffled the length of the long gallery, much to the amusement of the room attendant. He could get up to quite a speed!
Our holiday home was in a very rural part of Wales, near Llansannan, and pretty much in the middle of nowhere, down a very steep and stony trackway but the view from the sitting room was the below image so it was well worth it.
Our second day was also to somewhere that we had already been on a previous holiday - the same one as Chirk Castle actually but this time we went for a slightly different thing. It was a fairly long drive there but, to be honest, we were so tucked away in our holiday home it took a minimum of 30 minutes to reach even the biggest town for food shopping! Our destination was Llangollen which is just so beautiful with that lovely river through it. It flows quite fast and there are lots of rocks and dips that you can see, breaking up the water - brave souls go white water rafting over that (not something that's ever appealed to me I admit). It's the sort of place that wouldn't look out of place in a historical movie.
We were going for something a little more sedate - horse drawn narrowboat rides!! Last time we'd visited Llangollen, we'd come in from a different way and were further along the canal (journeying over the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct on a normal narrowboat, this time we were being gently pulled along with barely any sounds other than the lapping of the water against the boat, the clop of the horse's hooves and our little people squeaking excitedly at the passing ducks.
Of course I'm not sure the horse drawn versions would have had a fitted oven or an electric hob on them, they were usually used in a far more practical way to transport goods up and down the canal which would have been much busier than the more private section we went up and down. We did pass another tour boat coming the other way and it was interesting to watch how the horse handlers were able to unclip one of the boats from the horse to allow the two horses to pass each other without getting in a muddle, then clip back when we had passed.
We stayed a little while longer in Llangollen, wandering around the town and buying ice cream and pasties. We walked along the river too where there was a playground for the little ones. This was our first family holiday with three boys under 4 years old. Since Covid, our family have just been doing staycations and exploring places around where we live rather than going away. Initially it just wasn't worth the risk that we might get locked down again, or have to wear masks and pre-book everything depending on where we went, plus UK holiday prices had shot up because everyone was doing the same thing whilst it was more difficult to travel abroad. It sort of took the fun out of the idea of a holiday but this year we were back on and trying to figure out how to holiday as grandparents, aunts, uncles and babies all together!
The trick really seemed to be to do something as one group in the morning, and then split up in the afternoon. The babies needed to nap or to have their own adventure (usually involving letting them run/bottom shuffle around somewhere to let off some energy) which not everyone else was interested in, and then we met up again for dinner at the holiday home. A nice week-long ritual.
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