Books, Castles, and Tintern Abbey

A distinctive feature of Hay-on-Wye is the number of used bookshops. I chose this town because my parents love used books, particularly my mom. She has been searching for a book called Our Island Story but she wants the old hard-cover version, not the new paperback version. We figured if we were to find it anywhere, it would be in Hay-on-Wye. We spent a couple of hours in the morning looking for it but nobody had a copy. Some people claimed to have had a copy or two but sold them during the past week. Oh well, at least we got to explore the town and pick up some food for lunch from some proper bakery and deli shops.

As we wandered the town, dad and I were pleased with a couple of unique discoveries. My discovery was spotting a dog who looked just like a dog we had when I was a teenager. Our dog's name was Monty and he was supposed to be a lab-border collie cross, but he ended up weighing over one hundred pounds – far from the medium size dog we were promised by the rescue shelter – and his breed has been an ongoing mystery. His mom was a border collie and I'm now pretty sure she was crossed with a flat-coated retriever (who was maybe crossed with a newfoundland!). My dad's discovery was a couple from Israel who saw a didgeridoo played on TV, found wood to make their own, and ventured to the UK to busk and play their instruments for spare change.

There's even an outdoor bookshop!

Today we drove through towns with names like Llangorse and Crickhowell and explored insanely narrow roads through the countryside (I mark random back roads on the GPS to get us off the main roads with mixed results, but always entertaining).

My view from the side-view mirror of mom taking a photo through the back window.

On single-track roads there are often high hedges blocking the views from the side windows and the views around corners. Areas are occasionally provided to pull over and make way for another vehicle, but driving on these roads includes a lot of cautious rounding of corners (the locals drive like it's a normal road), dad yelping about the car getting scratched, and silent prayers like, "No other cars, no other cars, please no other cars, no cars, no cars..."

This is what is referred to as a "single track road".
I drove on a lot of them - nerve-wracking but fun!

We noticed in a tour book we borrowed from a friend that there was a castle just off the main road we planned to drive along today, so late this morning we stopped at Tretower Castle for a quick exploration. We could see the castle from the road, but we weren't sure how to reach it. We saw a farmyard with access so we pulled in and nobody was around so we parked near the tower and walked through a gate to reach it. I had noticed a sign as we pulled in but only caught the words "entry" and "castle" so we figured this might be the only access point. I was still a bit nervous about being on private property but we didn't plan to be there long anyway.

Tretower Castle.

Looking up the tower at Tretower Castle.

On our way out of the driveway I slowed down to read the sign properly. We all got a good laugh out of my mistake.

"NO ENTRY TO CASTLE. FARM ONLY."
Oops.

We drove down a side road and discovered a proper parking lot providing access to the castle. They need better signage.

This inn caught my eye for obvious reasons, but I really pity the poor staff member responsible for watering all those baskets.

We also stopped at Raglan Castle, my new favourite castle ruins (it's a fifteenth century moated fortress). I still love Harlech Castle in Wales (I loved walking along the top of the outer wall), but Raglan has more area to explore - and it has a moat!

How the castle originally looked. The huge tower on the left can still be climbed via a stone, spiral staircase.

We finished our afternoon at Tintern Abbey. A friend in Canada told me about this place when I was house-sitting in Wales last year but it was too far away to visit. I was excited to finally have a chance to see these beautiful ruins and they didn't disappoint.





This afternoon we encountered some car trouble and it took almost two hours to have road-side assistance come and sort things out. The best they could figure was that a valve was having issues and next time I lost power going from third gear to fourth, I should press the clutch and lay on the gas to clear things out. I was told there would be a big cloud of “junk” behind the vehicle and then it should run fine. Ah, that's reassuring.


We called the B&B where we're staying tonight to tell the owner we would be a bit late and eventually arrived at the house just after 9 p.m. We were greeted in the front yard by a little terrier named Sammy – little did we realize that was the only friendly thing at the home and a nightmare awaited us the next morning.

Sammy.