I went down to the Caribbean carnival but only managed a couple of good shots from a whole roll of slide film. Some we're over exposed due to the cross- process, the rest were simply blurred due to all the movement and my error. The boy above was the star of the show...he lead the parade and performed like a pro. The crowd loved him.
The final stop on our road trip was the Big Chill Festival. Its becoming a bit of a family tradition, this being the third year we have done it. Blah blah...i'll write something here eventually, not that it makes a difference. i could write anything really. gobbledigoolies. who the fuck am i actually writing this for. why am i pretending its for any one other than me (and you sam :)) i might as well write my fucking shopping list here. bread. meat. beer.
Hay on Wye, the town of books, is twinned with Timbuktu and was declared an independent kingdom by a man named Richard Booth. He also declared himself the king, and currently lives in the town castle, which is also a bookshop. Hay has over thirty bookshops including a converted cinema that is home to over 300'000 second hand books.
We had a great night drinking with the locals in some of the real ale pubs around Brecon. I found myself in quite a heated game of Quoits. My team mate was Mick, to tell you the truth i can't remember if we won or lost, although that probably means the latter.
Brecon has a Cathedral with a cafe. Thats all i have to say. Its a nice enough place, we missed the jazz festival by a couple of days which would have brought some life to the town i suspect. The whole place seemed strangly empty, despite the campsites being relatively full. Perhaps we were looking in the wrong places.
According to the legend the original bridge was built by the Devil. He built the bridge in return for the first living soul to cross. An old woman sacrificed her dog by luring it onto the bridge first with a loaf of bread, thus thwarting the Devil and saving herself. The old woman soon died of natural causes, but because she was guilty of such a selfish act, she was rejected by St Peter at the Pearly Gates and can still be heard in the echos of the bridge screaming from the seventh layer of Hell.
This is Martin Rhodes with his metal detector on Barmouth beach. Martin has been detecting metal for 42 years. I asked him if he had ever found any treasure, he said he had never found anything considered treasure under the treasure act, but put together over the years he has found more than enough to get by on. Roman coins, arrow heads, jewellry, not to mention all the lost cash. "I'm going to finish off for the day now, see if any kids have left me any pounds."
We spent the night at Barmouth beach playing Hillbilly Darts and watching the tide come in. It were loverly.
While we we're planning our journey, Pete told us about this little Toll Bridge that crosses the sea. He said it was really high and rickety and that when a train passed by the side the whole thing would shake. One wrong turn would send you plummeting to certain death. We thought "yea why not" and accelerated towards it. Its actually just some blokes road/bridge that he charges 40p to cross like a well mannered troll.
Portmeirion is an Italian style village in Gwynedd. The village is actually still populated which is amazing considering the amount of tourists swarming around. Beautiful as it is, it is very dificult to get good pictures without fat families wandering into shot with camera phones raised high. Not that we were any different, we just had better cameras.
