A shorter post, this one - for Christmas myself, Jeremy, Rachel and her brother Dave travelled from London to Swansea for Christmas for 4 nights and we were joined for the last 2 by their friends Tianyi and Tristan. Rachel had gone to a lot of trouble trying to organize a Christmas getaway that suited us all and was practicable for us all to travel from/to - Dave lives in Brighton and Tristan and Tianyi in Cardiff. After a few options things gelled for Swansea - we were staying in a house Rachel organized through Airbnb.
It was a pretty fantastic house - lots of room, double storeyed and there was a view of the sea from the upper storey. Getting everything to Swansea was slightly comical - Jeremy and Rachel each had a big trundler bag, almost entirely full of food and there was a separate cooler bag and my bag also had bottles of beer in it (extremely weighty!). It was a huge amount of food but we would need it, and thanks to Rachel's very thorough shopping we did not want for anything during our stay in Swansea. Lugging all the luggage through the tube (including a change of lines, and many stairs) to the train station was a mission at the time, but kind of humorous now. For some reason I didn't expect to be on a High Speed Train to Swansea, probably because I knew it took just a little over 3 hours to travel there by train - I didn't realise it was so far away from London.
I've never been to Wales before, but from what I've seen it's quite nice - and what I've seen is soley Swansea as train travel was done in both directions in the dark so you couldn't see a thing. Signs are in both English and Welsh, and there are even Welsh-speaking TV shows on the local channels. We were staying in an area called Gower which was close to The Mumbles, which we could see in our view out the window and during a Christmas Day walk we stumbled across the Oystermouth Castle nearby. On the 27th, with Tainyi and Tristan we all took a big walk down to the Mumbles to see the pier and lighthouse - the lighthouse area looked straight out of an Enid Blyton story, you could easily imagine the Famous Five making their way over to the Lighthouse to solve some mystery. For most of the time we were in Swansea we had good weather - only Boxing Day it rained, not that it mattered much since we had a nice warm house to relax in.
What did we do during our time in the house? Pretty much eat, sleep, watch TV or play board games. TV had a ton of movies on - we watched all 3 Back to the Futures as well as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Well, at least I did - possibly for some of them the others were preparing food for meals, I'm not so good at that sort of thing so left the experts to it but felt kind of stink for not being able to contribute. A dishwasher largely replaced the one skill I thought I might be able to contribute too! The meals were awesome, and the games were a lot of fun - the most controversial being one called The Resistance which we needed all 6 of us to play; 2 players are spies who's job is to try and fail the resistances missions, but the other resistance players have to try and figure out who the spies are before the spies fail 3 missions and win. End result is there is a lot of accusing going on, a lot of theories and a lot of thinking and strategizing. It was intense but a lot of fun - but also had the potential to cause a lot of upset as the accusations were getting pretty intense.
We did get through almost all of the food though, which showed that we didn't bring silly amounts of excess food - but the two big trundler bags did go back to London virtually empty! On the train trip back Tianyi and Tristan came with us, and all of us (except for Dave who chose to sit elsewhere) played card games on the way back which made time fly. I was actually quite sorry the trip was over - I had a hell of a lot of fun with good company and London seems very cold and brooding by comparison. Mind you, it will only be a week or so before we jet away to the Canary Islands for 7 days in the winter sun there - where it should hopefully be tshirt weather.
Wishing the few people who actually read this blog a Happy New Year!