Saturday 9 March 2013

Soul food......

Work-life balance has been completely out of kilter of late and working away for much of the week has meant that Melanie and I have seen very little of each other. Dragging my fatigued corpse through the door and dribbling on the sofa doesn't really count and we were well overdue a break. We're off to France for 10 days at Easter but that just seemed too far away. In any case, it's traditional for us to visit the coast, out of season before the hordes arrive and appreciate the faded grandeur of the British seaside resort.

Our destination of choice for the last few years has been Whitby but we decided that a trip down the west coast would make a change. So having consulted the barometer of taste - Trip advisor - we headed off last Friday afternoon to Abersoch, a place I haven't visited in years. Mel has never been to the Welsh coast before so was even more excited than I was. 

We arrived at 3pm, an hour before we were able to check into our boutique B&B the Venetian. We had a quick walk down the road but quickly dived into the first decent pub we came across, St. Tudwals.  Thoroughly refreshed we emerged an hour later having rediscovered my talent for thrashing people at pool and blinked as we discovered the clouds had disappeared and revealed a magnificent blue sky and low winter Sun.  It was to be a sign of things to come, we barely saw a single cloud for the rest of the weekend. 



Our B&B was superb, the owners could not do enough to make our stay perfect and indeed it was. We drank our stresses away, ate until we could eat no more and then walked away the damage along the beautiful coastline by day. I'm not exaggerating when I say the conditions could not have been more perfect and the lack of people around to spoil it was a bonus. 

On the recommendation of a friend who was brought up in the area, we visited a little resort called Criccieth on the Saturday and were so taken with the place that we went back on the Sunday morning to explore even further. I have a real thing about small British seaside towns and Criccieth ticked every single box. No tackiness, lovely cafe's with homemade cakes and ice-creams, well preserved Castle looking out to sea and all pinned against the backdrop of the Snowdonian mountains. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.



We returned to Manchester on Sunday afternoon re-invigorated and well equipped to cope with whatever the next four weeks has to throw at us.


2 comments:

  1. I love the sunset pic. What kind of camera have you got? I am thinking of upgrading mine.
    Once, when Stephen was at a camp at Criccieth, ( Bit like Scout camp), there was such a storm that the cook tent blew away!
    One bloke was carrying his camp bed out of his tent,which had just collapsed, and it blew out of his hands into the next field! Happy Days!

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  2. It's a Panasonic Lumix G2. Couple of years old now and the new Lumix ones are really good. It was actually a Sunrise pic as Mel got up early to have a wander down to the beach. I'm embarrassed to say I missed it, I was pushing out z's.

    All my memories of North Wales were windy and rainy Viv, that's probably why I loved it so much last week....

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