The day started off with me feeling like hell. I was aching (flu-like) to begin with, had sort of a low-grade sick going on, and still felt nauseous from the evening before. That my body was doing it’s best to ‘help out’ with a little impromptu housecleaning did not help my mood. Dave and Lori rode with me, while Jackie (who had certainly suffered my poor temper all night — more than enough before we ever got to the cars) rode with Dave and Margie to stave off a vacation/homicide.
Thus, three-by-three, we made our way to Tintern Abbey. It wasn’t as far as Dave and Margie had remembered (since they’d stayed quite a bit further west when they’d last come to the area) and we came upon it suddenly.
[The following pictures of Tintern are almost entirely the work of Jackie and ***Dave. I would at this point be remiss if I didn’t also direct people to ***Dave’s Picturetrail site, where he’s posted all of his trip-related pix. This is one of my favorites of the Tintern visit.]
Tintern was a working abbey ‘decomissioned’ during the reign of Henry VIII and gifted off to a local lord who then leased it out in bits and sections to farmers and businessmen.
As the years progressed, the locals cannibalized the site for wood, paving stones, glass, and the lead that comprised the roof. What remains are the stony outlines of the abbey outbuildings whose “floors” are filled in with gravel to give the general idea of how the place was laid out, all of which surround the Abbey proper.
The walls of the abbey itself are still largely intact, although the roof is gone, which leads to an amazing ruin: the flagstones have all been removed centuries ago, so the cathedral remains, framing the open sky above and perfect grassy “floor” below, with mountains showing where stained glass might normally be. From nave to altar and across both trancepts everything is grass and moss. If druids had built cathedrals, they would have built Tintern Abbey the way it stands today. Just amazing.
Chepstow Castle is about ten miles by road from Tintern, a long and looming keep on the stony cliffs over a river. The place had over a dozen masters during the time of its active service, almost all of whom added on to the original keep in some way, creating a castle that crawls for about 300 meters along the top of a rocky cliff, filled with nooks and crannies of all types as old was added to by new. We had a great deal of fun crawling around the place from top to bottom (the highlight was a five-story tower at the bottom corner of the keep that could easily be isolated from the rest of the castle by locking off a few doors, and whose parapets are still manned with guards, of a sort), then walked into town to have (very good) tea and lunch at St. Mary’s Tea House.
Following that, the group split up about half & half for two hours. DaveG, Lori and I managed laundry duties while ***Dave, Margie, and Jackie hit every shop in town.
During the drying cycle, ***Dave and Jackie returned and ***Dave mentioned picking up a remaindered pottery goblet at one of the local shops. This reminded me that Dave and Margie had, during their last trip, picked up a couple of neat ceramic goblets (proper, cludgey, “Holy Grail”-style things) and that I’d wanted to try to duplicate that trick while we were over here — in turn this prompted me to comment “You know, I was thinking that that’s really what I wanted to pick up while I was over here; some nice pottery goblets.”
I would grow to regret those words over the next few days.
After we’d wrapped up the clothing drudgery (during which I tried desperately to get more caught up on the notebook in which I was journalling the trip), we all saddled up and headed to a restaurant that Dave & Margie had visited a number of times during their last visit. It was Valentine’s Day, everyone was a little tired, and they wanted to make sure that dinner would be a Sure Thing.
There were, it turned out, a few problems with this plan. The first was that Dave and Margie had fond memories of a restaurant “just down the road” from the B&B they’d stayed at when last in Wales. While it certainly was that, it was just as certainly not just down the road from either Chepstow or our current B&B, but what’s a little driving for a good meal, I say: starting from our B&B, the drive we were talking about was an hour shorter than the one I do to Fort Collins a dozen or more times a month.
But, as I said, we weren’t starting from our B&B, we were starting in Chepstow, with a number of junctions and road changes to make on the way, in the dark.
Therein lies the story.
DaveG came back to the car after discussing the route with ***Dave, “Bristol” stuck firmly in his mind, except that “Bristol” had been used as a means of illustrating which way not to go on the M4, and that detail sort of got missed (don’t look at me: I wasn’t listening to the directions in the first place :) — we ended up back over the river/bay dividing the two sub-countries, on the English side of things. I then proceeded to get us horribly turned around by misreading at least two roundabout signs. This left us another half-hour or forty-five minutes delayed and down 4.50 pounds for the toll bridge. (Remember the toll bridge? I told you we’d get back to it.) Margie and Dave had run into highway congestion on the M4 from an accident that had slowed them down quite a bit, but they still managed to get there in plenty of time to get in the half-hour queue for a non-smoking table and actually acquire the table before we arrived.
None of this really helped anyone’s mood much, as everyone was grumpy about getting lost, paying the toll again, how far away the restaurant seemed (in the dark, after getting lost, everything seems far away), the fact that we were down to about a quarter tank of gas (actually no big deal at all), and anything else that came to mind. When we arrived it was, in ***Dave’s words, “Bite-ass cold” outside and not a lot warmer at the table inside.
The food was great, however paled by the mood, but we preservered and made it through the night without any harsh words or death. I’d call this the low point for the trip, but again we didn’t actually kill each other, so at least it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
We stopped at Merthyl Tidfel, paid $65 to fill up our 13 gallon tank (!), and fled back to the B&B to get some sleep.
