Category: Uncategorized

Friday Nov 3rd 2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today we visited Erddig Hall a National Trust property close to Wrexham. The property was owned by the Yorke family for over 250 years and is situated on a 1,200 acre estate, with a grade 1 listed formal garden following an original 18th century design.

Like many of these properties it had gone into total decline until the NT took it over, however the Yorke family had hardly ever thrown anything away and there were over 30,000 objects stored away in barns and the few dry areas of the house that still existed. Below stairs shows the life of the domestic staff with an interesting range of photos and descriptions, showing the Yorke family’s high regard for their servants. Upstairs the rooms show the lifestyle of the Yorke family who were comfortably well off but didn’t appear to entertain on a lavish scale.

The outbuildings and gardens are fascinating and they have a variety of approx 150 different types of apple trees, at the moment in the autumn you can purchase the apples they have harvested.

After leaving Erddig we drove into Wrexham which is the largest town in North Wales and dates from the bronze age, the Romans settled there and founded a brick work and slowly over the centuries it developed into an important market town. In the 19c the railway arrived and this created new work and development of the iron and steel making industry, coal and lead mining, quarries and brickworks and a brewery. In the 1930s there was a terrible mining disaster killing 261 miners and during this decade industry went into decline. The town is now home to Glyndwr University, it has extended its shopping facilities with a new shopping centre giving shoppers the opportunity to buy from traditional small businesses to large stores.

Wrexham is also noted for being the home of the infamous Judge Jeffries also known as the hanging judge, and to being the home of Eliyu Yale after whom  Yale University is named.

October 25th 2017

A beautiful sunny October day so we thought we would take a ride to Oxford to undertake research prior to our planned three day visit in Homer over New Year.

Using the M42 and M40 it only took 2 hours to get there and apart from a slight hiccup at the very end of our journey when we overshot the entrance to the campsite  it was an easy journey. The site is advertised as parking on grass so there was a little concern with regard to parking up in the middle of winter, we walked around the site and found the site warden who was extremely helpful and informed us that during the winter units were parked up on the tarmac roads to prevent the problem.

The site is approx 1.5 miles from Oxford City centre so we took a slow walk into the city where we enjoyed lunch sitting outside a pleasant cafe, it was 18 degrees centigrade such a pleasant change to recent weather. A part of this walk was to evaluate how easy it would be to access the many restaurants there, it was interesting to see how regular the buses were.

As we are returning at the end of December we didn’t want to do too much sight seeing so we only walked around a small area and were impressed by the new development/shopping centres of course there is so much history in Oxford you can help but stumble over it round every corner.

Looking forward to the return trip.

October 18th 2017

Now we have the freedom we took the opportunity today to visit the NEC mid week accompanied by good friend Phil, who kindly provided the transport.

The show was over a large number of Halls and there was certainly a very good range of motorhomes and marques. Now if we’d won the lottery last night we could certainly have found something to our taste, strangely it wouldn’t have been easy. Leaving aside the technical difficulty of many of the motorhomes were too heavy for me to legally drive, too long for me store etc the main difficulty was the layout.

Everyone has different tastes and requirements but the recent trend for end bedrooms does seem to have introduced certain strange arrangements, in some you have to walk through the bathroom to get to the bedroom and in others the opposite, through the bedroom to get to the bathroom. Kitchens seem to be shrinking, cookers and sinks minuscule and work surface non existent, not good news for those of us who wish to spend long periods away. Ah well as we didn’t win the lottery we will stay with our old favourite Homer the Hymer.

Whilst there we joined the Caravan and Motorhome Club so we can extend the range of sites and facilities we can use.

Sunday 15th October 2017

A beautiful warm sunny morning in Carrog, warm enough to sit out. We left the site at 11.30 and drove slowly back, the roads were quite busy, we called in at the British Ironworks Centre near Oswestry which has developed even more since we were there last. 

We enjoyed marvelling at the sculptures some we had seen before and new ones including a sculpture made out of knives handed in during amnesties which was destined for display in London but the Mayoral Office turned it down as it would give the wrong image to foreign tourists!

Home at 3.15pm.




Saturday 14th October.

It’s strange to think that four weeks ago today we were in the process of having a new starter motor fitted and were then on our way to Mont St Michel, the weather here today in mid Wales is nicer than it was on that day in northern France!

This morning we caught the steam train from Carrog to Llangollen at £16 a head return. Well that was the theory, the guard said get on quick we are running very late and pay on the train, so we climbed aboard and sat in one of the old style carriages with everything running off the corridor. With a puff of smoke and a burst of steam we set off, however in the opposite direction to Llangollen, the train was so late it was still heading to Corwen!

So twenty minutes later we were back in Carrog and heading on to Llangollen where we arrived much later than anticipated. We took a few photos at the station and of the river running alongside followed by a wander around the town popping in and out of a few shops of interest but managed to avoid spending any money. We had lunch in a tea room in a side street and then headed for Llangollen Pavillion which was hosting a food festival which cost us a £5 each to enter. There were a large variety of catering stalls, stalls selling their food and drink that they produce, craft stalls and an arena with a live band, we splashed out £11 on a variety of Welsh cheeses.

In the midst of these stalls was one called “Bobs Curry Hut” when I looked at its propieters I realised that I recognised them, they were parents of children we had taught, the youngest one we remember being Gurdeep, we had a good chat and they bought us up to date about their children and offered us some samosas but we were already full from lunch so we declined. Small world eh. We walked from there to the Llangollen canal where should you wish you can participate in a 45 minute horse drawn boat ride or once a day the 2 hour return ride to the Pontcysyllte aqueduct . Unfortunately we had time for neither.

We caught the last train back from Llangollen at 16.10 pm which fairly rattled along, arriving on time at Carrog probably the only time that day, every station, lay-by, bridge was crammed with steam train buffs taking photos and videos of every detail of the train.

After chilling out for a while we walked up to The Grouse where we had a table booked and enjoyed a pleasant meal and a few drinks and chatted for hours, back at Homer we had a night cap and tackled the Times crossword.

Friday 13th October 2017

Today we drove 78 miles to Carrog a small village approx 5 miles past Llangollen in Denbighshire. 

We are parked on Carrog Station Camp Site just off the A5, the site is bordered by the River Dee on one side and the Llangollen Railway line on the other. We were a little earlier arriving than we thought and took the opportunity to drive on a little further and visited the small town of Corwen where we bought some Welsh butter. We also had lunch in the car park there watching as a mechanic attempted to get the wipers on a local bus to work.

We parked up on the site and walked approx 100m to a bridge over the railway line, this weekend is a steam rally and there were two trains going back and forth pulled by steam engines I took a few photos. As we watched the activity at Carrog station our friends Alison and Peter drove down the lane in their motorhome and we guided them into their pitch next to us.

After a cuppa and a chat we went back to the station and took even more photos of the trains, it’s our intention to catch one tomorrow to Llangollen, we then walked back down the lane to an old 17c Packhorse Bridge over the River Dee, a further 100m on was The Grouse Inn and it seemed very rude not to pop in and try a pint.

Back to Homer where we enjoyed an evening meal and then just to stretch our legs and help our meal go down we had planned to walk back up to The Grouse, however as it was raining, instead we walked 5m to Alison and Peters and played Uno whilst drinking their beer, no distance at all to walk home.

Oct 12th 2017

For the past two days Homer has been receiving specialist care under the expertise of Dave Newell Leisure Vehicle Services, also known as Diamond Dave who writes for motorhome magazines and appears on the motorhome channel on TV.         davenewell.co.uk

It was time for Homers MOT and a much needed service, we had no record of a recent service and as we knew there were a few problems we felt there was a need for the work to be carried out by a motorhome expert. The MOT resulted in a failure, no surprise there, many of the items were quite small problems but it turned  out there was a need for two new tyres and the replacement of two brake cylinders.

We also asked for the suspension to be renewed, so we now have new beefed up springs fitted on the front and new dampers on the rear which has resulted in the front of Homer being lifted by about 10cm and hopefully will give us a much smoother ride.

Tomorrow we should find out as we head off into Wales.

An autumn morning in Ironbridge, the day has a touch of coolness but warmed by splashes of colour from the autumn leaves, the River Severn is flowing quickly and is running high after the recent rains.

It was reasonably quiet when we arrived but as the morning went on, gradually more tourists began to arrive and bring a buzz of activity to this historic Shropshire town. The main purpose of our visit today was to visit the antiques centre, but we always enjoy a walk around the town.

Ironbridge is known as “the birthplace of the industrial revolution” mainly becauseAbraham Darby first perfected the smelting of iron using coke, however the industrial revolution was stirring in many places at the same time. The famous Iron Bridge is a 30m cast iron bridge, the first in the world, it was built across the River Severn in 1779.                                                                                                            

Wherever you travel in France the French traditionally plant trees around their town squares and their car parks, as you can imagine in the summer months parking spaces under trees come at a high premium and people fight to park in any shade that’s apparent.
This tradition also extends to campsites and aires and is especially welcomed by people staying in caravans and motorhomes or camping cars as they are known in French.

This summer we stayed on a variety of aires in towns, mountains, countryside and on the coast and most of the aires had good tree cover, in fact in many it was impossible to park up without being under a tree.

At first we too welcomed the opportunity to park in their shade to keep our motorhome Homer cool and then we could exercise the choice to sit and relax in the sunshine when we chose to.

However as the summer began to draw to a close, we began to experience a problem we hadn’t thought of.

It began in the Limoge region where our normally quiets nights were disturbed by the irregular plopping of acorns bouncing off the roof,sometimes in the early morning aided by the energetic grey squirrels that scurried around the trees. When in the Dordogne it changed to the slightly louder noise of horse chestnuts and then when we were on the Charente Maritime coast we experienced days of quite strong winds and we were on the receiving end of pine cones. One extremely windy night the roof was peppered by the fruit from large plane trees and an extraordinary amount of dead twigs.

When we drove up to Normandy and then on into Brittany there were fewer trees and this lead to undisturbed nights, until that is whilst on one aire adjoining the beach, seagulls decided to use us as a take off and landing pad.

Why didn’t we move Homer you may ask? Well on most sites there was no where to move to, and of course there is that smug and snug feeling that nothing can get you as you are curled up in your warm bed😊.

Wed 20th Sept 2017

Well here we are exactly eight weeks after we left “back um” again, or at least back at the England home, it was a very strange experience driving today, I felt I was on the wrong side of the road and on one occasion Michelle had to tell me I was on the French side!

Last nights wild camp in Plymouth was a first for us in the uk, the place was on several camping apps so we knew it was acceptable to stay there, it was eerie though to pull up in the dark not able to see where we were and what was around us. It was therefore a pleasant awakening this morning to open the curtains and see Plymouth Sound with boats going back and forth and naval ships moored up. The car park is part of a view point, parkland area and was well frequented by dog walkers.

We drove from Plymouth to Ilminster to call in on good friends Keith and Jenny, we are always given a warm welcome and Keith’s coffee is a legend, we talked non stop for two hours and then sadly it was time to depart and a quick, well, very quick for Homer, journey up the M5, mostly travelling at 60 to 70 mph.

Now Homer is parked outside waiting for us to organise his service and MOT before hopefully not too long we will be going away for a few days.

Altogether on this break we travelled 2,830 miles in Homer.