One of the best things about being a history buff living in Wales is the abundance of awesome castles throughout the countryside. Not far from where I live is the picturesque ruins of Ogmore Castle (Castell Ogwr ), built by the Norman invaders circa 1100 and finally abandoned altogether sometime in the mid 19th century.… Read more Ogmore Castle
Last weekend my husband and I took the girls on a trip to Cornwall, which is a breathtakingly beautiful county and a unique cultural area. It was a Brythonic kingdom, one of the Celtic nations during the the Atlantic Bronze Age, and retains a strong reginal identity to this day. It is surrounded by sea… Read more The Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall
This weekend my husband and I took our three daughters to the lovely county of Cornwall, one of the seven (or six; it’s under dispute) Celtic nations, to visit the Cornish Seal Sanctuary. Although all the girls love seals, our middle child, Buttercup, wants to be a marine biologist specializing in studying pinnipeds when she… Read more The Cornish Seal Sanctuary
I just went for a walk in the woods up Ryans Creek Mountain here in Whitley County with my mom and dad, and as usual, I got to learn a lot about my families’ subsistence methods when they were still in thrall to the coal mining camps of the region. As you walk up the… Read more A Walk in the Kentucky Woods
One of the nicest things about camping at Chapel Farm House (aside from sponging off our Host Family) was the short, easy walk to the Church of St. Mary, which just happens to be a Grade II listed building dating back from the early 1400s, with additions in the 1600s and some restoration in 1883. … Read more The Church of St Mary, Craswall, Herefordshire
I have been camping, and lo it was very much fun! Sweet Babou and I and the small herd of daughters were invited to go along with our friends, whom we call our Host Family who are showing us how to be properly British and do British stuff, on a small camping trip for the… Read more Camping in the Welsh Marches
Sunday was a lovely, sunshiny day in South Wales so my Sweet Babou and I loaded the kids up and took them to meet some friends for an amiable amble through Fforest Fawr (which means the big (hunting) woods in Welsh), also known to locals as Bluebell Woods. It feels wonderfully rural but in reality… Read more A Sunny Sunday in Fforest Fawr
We are, so to speak, right down the road from a really cool trackway – the fossilized footprints of a dinosaur from 200 million years ago. The trackway is in the Bendricks, “a stretch of coastline and an important paleontological site in the Vale of Glamorgan in south Wales located along the northern coast of… Read more A’fossiling We Will Go
Today is my darling husband’s fortieth birthday, and we took the kids out of school for a day to celebrate Sweet Babou’s big 40 properly. We drove up to the Indy Zoo and White River park to have some fun in the sun with our hun! We rented a quadruple-bicycle-buggy-thingy (its technical name, really) and… Read more Sweet Babou Turns 40 Today!
Have you ever been to Universal Studios Island of Adventure in Orlando, Florida? Well, thanks to my parents (THANK YOU MOM & DAD), my kids got to spend the day there as part of their Christmas vacation. The main attraction for my little geeklets was, of course, Hogwarts/Hogsmeade section of the park. We’re all big… Read more A Day of Hogwarts and Dinosaurs