finding JOY overseas: Spoon me.

Our road trips are coming to an end! We only have two left now – Ireland this week and France/Belgium the next. Last night we got back from a 3 day trip to Wales.

We left Thursday morning and drove 4 hours on the bus to an unknown city. Maybe if I had been awake for any part of the bus ride I would know! But alas. Sadly I don’t think I could tell you what direction Wales is from us. I know it’s north, but that’s about it. I just get on the bus, sleep, and get off when I’m told.

Anyway. I digress.

At the unknown city we picked up a tour guide who we spent the next four hours with going to church history sites. He talked to us all about the first members of the church in Wales. The Benbow Farm, if you’ve heard of it… we went there. It sounded painfully familiar to me, so I’m thinking maybe it’s some huge church site that I really should have been more impressed with?

That night we actually stayed in Northern England at a Hostel. The highlight of the evening was when we found a book “So you Think You Know Harry Potter?” It had 1000 trivia questions about HP. My dream book. This was one of the hard questions: "What was the password to get into the Prefect bathroom?" If you know THAT, you are a true HP fan.

Friday we drove to Wales and went to the Big Pit first. It’s an old coal mine that they’ve shut down and now just use as a museum/tour place. We got to put on legit mining hats and gear and go deep down in the mine! The craziest part was when our guide had us all turn off our head lights. He wanted us to see how dark it was for the little 6 year old boys who worked in the mine. I have NEVER experienced such pure blackness before. I couldn’t see my hand 3 inches from my eyes! (Which I realize isn’t all that impressive considering I was wearing black gloves…) But you could feel the darkness it was so intense. It was really cool to learn about the conditions in the mines and how things worked. The horses apparently had to live down in the mine 50 weeks of the year! Sad, huh?? Oh and our guide made us all sing our National Anthem before he would lift us up to ground level again. We sounded glorious FYI.

Friday night and Saturday we stayed in Cardiff and were left to explore. My favorite part was roaming on Saturday morning. We found a market! If you’ve been reading my blogs AT ALL you will know that in the past few weeks I’ve developed a love for markets and their nuts. There is always a stand of nuts where you can buy all sorts of candied nuts and stuff that are SO GOOD. I bought 3.50 worth of almonds, cashew, and yogurt-covered bananas. Best purchase of the trip. Hands down. I tried to eat them slowly so they’d last all day… but I failed miserably. They were gone in 20 minutes. I’ve decided that I may go to a market here in London the day before I come home and purchase every yogurt covered dried banana there. That way I can have at least a 3 day supply until I can find some back in America.

The Benbow Farm. Lots of cool history about the Benbow family, but mostly i was just reminded why I can't ever live on a farm. It smelt SO bad. SOO bad.

An alley we walked down to get to one of the church history sites. Mostly I just wanted you all to see how cute Haley, Sharon and I look from behind.

Haley and I in front of a church we visited. I wish I could tell you more about it.... I wasn't listening to our tour guide.

We hiked to the top of a hill and it was so windy. The wind could almost held my body weight! Apparently it isn't always windy though because Wilford Woodruff used to hike up there to meditate when he was a missionary in England.

Tintern Abbey

Charlie's Angels meet Tintern Abbey Ruins.

This went better in my mind. It's supposed to look super cool and hip. Oh well.

I think the way we all posed says a lot about our personalities. Sharon is doing some flamingo bird thing, I'm masculinely pointing off into the distance, and Haley... looks like she needs to go to the bathroom. Or like the next Marilyn Monroe. Take your pick.

We mine coal.

So there is this Welsh Spoon tradition that I fell in love with. Boys used to carve spoons for girls they were interested in or in love with. If the girl accepted it, it meant she returned his feelings and they courted. They were called Lovespoons. Apparently this is where the term "spooning" originates. So there were wooden spoons everywhere with different symbols in them that meant different things. This was only part of what a shop claimed was the biggest love spoon ever.