when the weather wins...

I think camping is one of my favourite things to do - I love being outside and hearing nature at night (so long as that nature doesn't include bears!), I love being wrapped up in a warm sleeping bag and reading with my head lamp, and I love waking up in a tent. I love drinking a cup of hot tea in the morning while sitting outside your tent and planning a hike and picnic for the day - it's all just pleasant. So all of this was what I had in mind when my friend and I decided to go camping at the Brecon Beacons this weekend, a national park about an hour away from Swansea.

Unfortunately, neither of us counted on the sheer determination of the rain in Wales to foil our plans. We'd left Swansea Saturday morning, in spite of the pouring rain in the city, thinking that things would clear up by the afternoon (tip: never trust the Met Office. They lie.). It rained the whole way to Brecon, sometimes so hard that we could hardly see the sheep along the side of the road (no roadside fences here - we like sheep to be free to cross at their own convenience), and continued to rain intermittently all afternoon. There was a brief and welcome break when we set up our tent at the campground, but it started raining hard again in the evening and didn't stop until this afternoon. Lovely.

Both of us are geography students, and we've both spent enough time doing field work to not actually care about rain. But there's a big difference between having to do doing field work in the rain and choosing to spend a day hiking in the rain. So we agreed to postpone the hike for a sunny day, and ended up exploring a bit by car instead. Which brought us to a wonderful, wonderful place: Hay-on-Wye.

 

Hay-on-Wye is right on the border between England and Wales, and it's best known as the book capital of the UK - there are so many bookstores there, many of them used, and all of them full of character and just general fantastic-ness. Fortunately we could both spend hours (literally, as we discovered today) trawling bookstores, and so we spent an excellent day wandering between bookstores and searching for books. I tend to make a beeline for fiction, sci-fi/fantasy and cookery, but in one store I wandered over towards the 'self-sufficiency' section, because a book on henkeeping caught my eye (I have a not-so-secret dream of living out in the country with a large vegetable patch, hens and bees. In my mind it is fabulous, but I feel like the reality would be somewhat different...). Anyway!!! Imagine my surprise and then excitement when, right between henkeeping and goat husbandry I saw:

That's right - SOIL SCIENCE!!!! My unexpected and inexplicable academic passion. It was great - soil surveys from England and Wales, historical soil records from the UK and some textbooks. Such happiness! The woman at the cash register did give me a funny look when I handed over my pile of soil books, but really, when you can buy a textbook for £3, you just do it. Any student knows this.

Anyway, while the weekend did not go as planned, it was still pretty perfect. At least it stopped raining long enough on the way home for me to take pictures as proof that we actually went there!