it’s totally crazy, but on the second day of our walk in wales, we took a break from walking!  i don’t know why they scheduled the walk like that, but they did.  i guess they figured that after 11 or 12 miles, we’d need a break right away?

it was nice to have a break after one vigorous day of maybe 5-6 miles, or maybe seven.

our b&b, the Clock House in Marloes, was decorated really nicely, and we had a great breakfast.  our room was so very small that there was no space to both walk around the bed at all, but it was nice.  we should have asked for a bigger room since we were there two nights, but we managed just fine.

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here are all the delicious-sounding lunch items, but i don’t think we had any lunch at all, just cake in the middle of the day.

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it was all very modern, a huge contrast to our quaint and quirky b&b in dale, allenbrook.

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Vegemite!  we both love vegemite; kevin had it in australia because that’s where his ex-wife is from.  i think i first tried it in LA and i love its salty deliciousness.  i haven’t found many americans who have ever tried it, or like it.  kinda like people feel about anchovies, i suppose.

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i had a delicious yogurt parfait as well as a buttery croissant plus more stuff, which would have been well and good if we’d planned on walking all day.

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free-range chickens out on the patio – they were rescue chickens!  the owner, john, said they’d rescued them from some evil chicken farm somewhere close by.  hmm, i only thought of awful animal places here in the US, not in a bucolic and charming place like wales.  it’s so awesome that they rescued them, isn’t it?  good people.

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cool art.  a puffin, which we hoped to see that day; we planned to drive to martin’s haven and take a boat ride out to skomer island, where there were many, many puffins.

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meanwhile, the chickens were very tame.

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across the street from the Clock House b&b is the actual Clock House – john said it sat in disrepair for a very long time and then it think somebody was going to tear it down and that caused quite a ruckus in town, and they saved and restored it.  whew.

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we got in our car and drove Martin’s haven, which we would have passed if we’d walked from dale the day before.  it was a very short drive on another teeny tiny road, and when we got to a parking lot with a guy in a booth manning it, i asked him where martin’s haven was.  he said “this is it!”  so martin’s haven is really just a little inlet, i guess, it’s certainly not even a tiny town.  there’s the place where you buy the tickets for the boat to go out to Skomer island, and you can buy postcards and ice cream cones at the little shop, but that’s really it.  public bathroom across the drive.  not a town at all.

the woman selling tickets said they live there part of the time, and the rest of the year they’re at their home in Snowdonia, and i think maybe they’re also something like rangers there?  i do remember that at their home up north there in Wales, they live really, really off the grid – no running water, no electricity, stuff like that.  her husband is the boat pilot out to skomer island, and they both seemed very content.

we had time to kill before the boat left, so we walked up this hill, and walked all around for about an hour.  it was a nice day, although overcast.  we were so incredibly luckily for much of the trip; the weather couldn’t have been more perfect.

down there at the bottom of the hill is the tiny little information place, with the attached bathroom.

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here is where the boat would come in.

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the flowers were lovely.

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we always saw random cows on our walks.

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we’d gotten there so early and bought our tickets, but then people started getting in line well before we did.  skomer island is famous for its massive influx of puffins, which have the bright beaks and are simply adorable and will walk right over your feet and they’re something you just don’t want to miss…but all the puffins had been there the week before, about a million of them, or at least literally a thousand or so.

but then they all left.  the woman at the ticket place said that a week ago, people had been lining up at FOUR IN THE MORNING to get tickets for the boat ride out to the island.

so it wasn’t a madhouse now, but of course that’s because there probably wouldn’t be much to see.  somebody said they’d see a puffin or two, but the whole thing sounded a little sketchy to me.

someday i’d like to really see a puffin, but i don’t know about that whole four in the morning thing.

here’s a photo of a puffin, so you can see why it would be awesome to see a whole huge gaggle of them all over the place.

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cutest bird ever!

here’s the boat coming in to get us; it didn’t look very big, plus we were suddenly so very far back in line.

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as we waited i saw this guy with his daughter on a leash, and it thought it was very funny.  quite a challenging path for such a tiny tike.

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next, the boat ride.

meanwhile, have a good day.

ok then

mrs. g.h.