the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, really the path, finally…

At the crack of 10 a.m. on wednesday, august 12th, we finally made it to the first gate onto the coast path.

This was the path along the Dale Peninsula; as I’ve probably mentioned, Dale is such a tiny town that people I talked to in Wales who lived in Wales hadn’t heard of it! for one thing, as of 2011, only 225 people lived there!  but the population has increased, which never happens here in the US in little towns – in 2001, only 205 people lived there.

even though there are no people in any of these photos, this is the day that we saw the most hikers.  i bet we saw…maybe 10?  15?  not many at all.  no americans.

this was a challenging day since it was our first day of hiking.  it was pretty hilly, in my estimation.

but most of the spots with hills had stones built in.

we walked down to this beach; in the background you can see the oil refinery smokestacks which were in Milford Haven.  it wasn’t so pretty over there, which is one reason we didn’t walk on that part of the path past them all.

we saw this ferry going by; it’s the Irish Ferry, which we were going to take to get to Rosslare, Ireland, after we were done with our Wales walk.  it looked quite big, bigger than i thought it’d be.

over there on the far left is the tip of the Dale peninsula – it looked so far away!  as we walked it got warmer and warmer, and we unzipped our zipoff pants and made them into shorts.

here it is close up, and it didn’t really take long to get this far.  these pictures were taken 11 minutes apart, so not so far.  i do remember an older woman walking by herself along this part of the path – most of the path was much more clearly defined than this bit, which is only really a path because you can see the tramped-down grass.

so this is a famous spot, as you can read about.  on wikipedia it says there was a big celebration in Dale in 1985 to commemorate Henry landing here.

kevin also took pictures.  BTW, his eye is improving, so hopefully soon he’ll start posting again to his site.  i know he probably has lots of great photos, and at least some of them must be different than mine.

cows, relaxing near these cottages.  i think they’re self-catering accommodations.

 

now we’re headed north, back towards Dale.

we stopped to have our lunch, and why didn’t i take a picture?  we bought two cheese sandwiches from the pub the night before.  some b&bs would pack you a lunch for a fee, but Allenbrook didn’t, but Elizabeth the proprietor said we could buy sandwiches from this pub.  they were seven pounds apiece, which right now is $10.65, pretty expensive for plain cheese sandwiches on baguettes.  they were pretty good-sized, though, and we just split one.

 

 

the best part of this lunch, besides relaxing, was that i think elizabeth felt bad at the shoddy sandwiches (even though they were actually quite delicious, really fine cheese), so she stuck two jaffa cake bars into our bags, which she’d been kind enough to keep in her fridge overnight.

we’d never had a jaffa cake bar, and i have to say they’re one of the most delightful cookies i’ve ever eaten.  jaffa cakes are a layer of sponge cake with orange jam on top, encased in a chocolate coating.  but these were jaffa cake bars, which were rectangular bars, more chocolatey, and simply fabulous.

here’s what the original jaffa cakes look like:

 

there’s a big posting on Wikipedia about a big controversy about jaffa cakes being classified as a cake or a biscuit (cookie), because cookies are charged a VAT in the UK and cakes aren’t.  i won’t go into it here, but you can always click if you’re so inclined.

here’s a jaffa cake bar, the kinds we had – as you can see, they’re quite a bit bigger than the original jaffa cakes.

btw, jaffa cakes are the best-selling cake or biscuit in the UK.

now i just want to eat one…

here are some wild horses – we saw quite a few of them during our different days of hiking.

here’s the town of Dale off in the distance, as we were almost done with the peninsula.

a pretty steep descent, but most of it had steps.  down on the left are people on the beach.  and right above kevin, somebody has pitched a tent.

i kinda of wished we’d walked down to the beach, but at this point we were totally exhausted, plus we’d have had to walk back up out of it again.

steep steps that we’d walked down.

up on the hill, a few cows were having a good time.

it was 2:30 by the time we reached a little cemetery on the outskirts of Dale.  We’d hiked about 5 1/2 miles in 4 1/2 hours.  so how could we have possibly walked so incredibly slowly?  i mean, we weren’t crawling!  but yes, we did stop every five minutes to take photos, and we rested.  also, i calculated the mileage on the mapmyrun website, and according to that, we actually walked seven miles.

it doesn’t matter; the great thing is that it was so beautiful, and i didn’t trip and plunge into the sea.

i can’t find the name of this cemetery.

there were many very old gravestones.

relaxing in the sun, we discussed the plans for the rest of the day – according to the brochure from our travel company, Macs Adventure, we had only walked five miles…and it was another 7-8 miles to our stop for the night, in Marloes.  At this point it was about 3:00, and at our current speed, we’d basically never get there.

luckily, our car was parked right there at the Allenbrook b&b, and we made the decision to get back in the car and drive to Marloes.  yes, we were “cheating,” and we’d miss seven-eight miles of lovely scenery – but we couldn’t bear the thought of trudging on.

we weren’t thrilled with the thought of getting back onto the tiny, dinky little roads, but figured it couldn’t be that bad since it was such a short distance in a car.

next, i’ll conclude this first day of hiking.

ok then,

mrs. accomplished the first day hughes.