it was a very busy sunday – we’d woken up in Carmarthen, driven to two hours Wyndcliffe Court Gardens, had a terrific lunch, walked around Chepstow and bought all the souvenirs we wanted, and then had a lovely visit to the Veddw House Garden, including tea with Anne Wareham and Charles Hawes. oh, and i haven’t mentioned that anne and i were chatting about websites and i told her about how mine was old and outdated and sadly in need of a total redo, and she mentioned somebody who had created her website. i can’t remember the woman’s name, but i contacted her, and she was too swamped with her projects, but she gave me the name of a guy she works with named GARY.
and now, here it is, almost a year later and the brilliant gary updated and spiffed up my site such a long time ago! yes, my webmaster lives in the UK. because we’re very very global around here. pretty cool.
so anyway, I’d picked our B&B where we were headed for two night near Chepstow because it was out in the country and looked idyllic. but as i’m sure i mentioned at least a few times before, being out in the country in wales is different from what we’re used to. in Wales, out in the country means teeny tiny roads usually surrounded on both sides with tall hedgerows which may or may not be hiding rock walls or other horrors that you wouldn’t want to smack into.
this b&b, Parsons Grove Holiday Cottages, was only 5.6 miles from Veddw, which sounded perfect to me. plus the cottages looked fantastic, except that the ones with the spectacular views had been all reserved.
oh well, i went ahead and booked it for two nights.
we left Veddw at about 7:00 at night, and somehow, i can’t say how, the directions were just bad. we took the long way, so instead of taking maybe 15 minutes, and being only 5.4 miles away…it took us 40 minutes. i don’t know why. dumbness on my part, probably. maybe i didn’t have quite enough pieces of map with me.
here’s a town called St. Arvans, which i can see on the online map now is clearly in the wrong direction, so that’s the problem.
…but the drive was pretty, anyway…
here’s a little town called Shirenewton, getting very close to parsons grove finally.
but then we had to turn off onto a little tiny road…
…and the roads just kept getting smaller…
…and the hedgerows were encroaching…
…and it was finally just kind of a dirt track with grass growing up the middle.
we drove down a steep hill, and there, in the middle of nowhere, was parsons grove holiday cottages. i think i also picked it because i love the name.
even though we had no view, it was a very cute little cottage.
two big comfy chairs! it was supposed to rain on monday, so we could curl up in the chairs and read if we wanted to.
it was very modern, with the glass partial door on the shower.
and then the resident dog walked right in! we were happy to see her.
this is our view out our front door. the place was full of cars, but i don’t remember actually seeing anybody, except at breakfast the next morning.
we were happy to have a place to land for the night. we didn’t feel like going out to dinner; anne and charles had told us about a grocery store where we could have stopped for some provisions, but we just didn’t feel like stopping anywhere. we happily ate some cheese and bread in our little cottage, and got in touch with Charles and planned to meet him late in the day on monday near Tintern Abbey. Anne probably wouldn’t be joining us, because she was a little touristed-out because of all the people who are always showing up at her garden. But it’d be great to see Charles again, and we looked forward to a laid-back Monday.
we’ll see about that.
ok then,
g. hughes.