Wales part 2, Pembrokeshire

 

Planning a trip can feel overwhelming - when to go and how to get there, where to stay and what to do. Dreaming about a way to slingshot my family to the farthest place we can reach, looking forward to all the potential for good memories, stretches my soul and relieves lots of kinks.

Whether the boys will remember Bishop's Palace or a brother's sleepy head on their shoulder in the backseat remains to be seen. Reading a book nestled in an unfamiliar bed an ocean away from their own or writing words like "skibidi" on steamy bathroom mirrors, foraging for seaweed or fording a river or the precious plastic grape from the antique store floor that followed along for the entire trip, all of it may be fair game.

Wales is home to more sheep than people. Look in any direction to see white dots against an almost-make-your-eyes-hurt green, with low stone walls cutting quadrilaterals across the country. At the risk of over-generalizing, people really liked to pile rocks together in the past. What we had expected, and did not experience, were buckets of rain. Our time was not near as damp as we anticipated and we awoke daily only to be astounded again by the sunshine and the moss, the otherworldly vibrancy. 

Our second stay was in Newport, the "quiet hero of Pembrokeshire" with lively street markets and cozy pubs. Traeth Mawr ("big beach") and Carn Ingli ("hill of angels" - and apparently of wild horses and slow worms) and Pentre Ifan's floating rock burial chamber were all nearby. We ventured to St. Davids, Britain's smallest city, to see the cathedral, a place of worship and pilgrimage for over fourteen centuries. All of us enjoyed a prearranged foraging course at Whitesands, and stopping to watch cliff divers at the Blue Lagoon along the way.

Vacation can flash a lens in front of your face, the right prescription that allows you to catch a glimpse of things in brand new ways. Watching Tuck pull something by its tail from a hole in the ground freaked me out at first, but in hindsight I can almost feel my own bewilderment with the world increase via the boys. More than once I had to cast aside my motherly notions of risk, to let them follow their own longings to touch as much of creation as possible.