Yak & Natter

Yesterday Cathy sent me this URL: http://www.seethru.co.uk/games/randomURL/. It’s a site that redirects you to a random .COM web site based on a word plucked from a dictionary at random. It’s my kind of a site… because for a while now I’ve been plucking random pictures from the internet based on dictionary words.

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We’d been toying with the idea of trying out kite buggying for a while, and wondered if we could find a course anywhere in the UK. After a bit of internet research I found Paraventure an “air powered activity” company based in Wales. I found out a bit more about it, and then we booked ourselves and Jono onto the one day Parakarting course.

The course was held in the Pembrey Country Park which has one of the longest and cleanest beaches in Britain (it reminded Jono of New Zealand), and our instructions were to meet Steve and Nick (our instructors) near the cafe at 10.30am on Sunday. There were 5 of us in our group, and we drove in convoy to Car Park 2, the car park with the best beach access. Our first task was to find a helmet to fit, and then to choose, and help adjust the buggies themselves. Once we all had a buggy which was sized about right, we packed our stuff onto our buggies and headed off along the beach to gate B (the start of the buggy zone). We set up a base camp, and Steve started to tell us all about power kiting. The first kite he unpacked had tangled cables (apparently Nick’s fault for not packing it away properly) and so we unpacked a second one and all had a go launching it and bringing it back down again before Steve kitted us all out with our own kites. I started off with a 1.9 metre sq Advance Janus, as Steve wasn’t sure how strong I’d be, Rich got a 3.1 metre sq kite, and Jono got an Advance Tethis. We all played with out kites for a while, and were given harnesses to ease our arms a bit, and then after more instruction Steve swapped me onto a 3.1 metre sq Advance Janus. I got on okay with this, and got a bit more pull out of it (which was great fun).

I had a bit of familiarisation time with this new kite, and then Jono, Richard and I got instruction from Nick on how to ride a buggy. We listened, and then tried one at a time with Nick keeping a careful eye on us.

We all thoroughly enjoyed it, and had great fun. Richard and I both got pulled out of our buggies a few times – I fell out mostly when I suddenly realised I was going a lot faster than I really wanted to be, and panicked… We all took a break, a chance to rest our arms, and Richard and I swapped kites. I didn’t get on very well with that kite, it wasn’t as forgiving as the Janus, and was a bit of a handful for me. I tried to buggy with it, but it has a much smaller window for flying, and so every time I tried to turn a corner I either came to a halt or fell out. Not the kite for me. Richard on the other hand, seemed to adjust well to the Janus and so it’s a possibility that a 3.1 metre sq Janus might be finding it’s way into our posession (I notice that the only UK retailers are Paraventure themselves).

Fortunately for me, Richard came back in with the Janus, and so I got to have another play in the buggy (I was feeling a bit fed up with myself – I’m not good at failing at something when I’d done alright not that long before). I did alright this time, and had some quite good runs up and down the beach and even controlled my speed a bit better before deciding that my arms really hurt and I needed to stop. Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring the kite down this time as my arms were just too sore and so Richard came to my rescue.

We all packed our stuff up, and headed back to the car park dragging our buggies behind us, discussing what a fantastic day we’d had. And it’s true, it really was great, but today, oh boy do my muscles hurt. Oh, and my face… I have had to endure people staring at my lobster red face, with very well defined sunglasses marks on it (this wasn’t sunburn, this was windburn…). Don’t forget to check out the photos.

If you want to learn to power kite or parakart, then check out Paraventure as they were really helpful and knowledgable and were worth the £65 that the course cost us.

Me, Jono and Jane needed to be near Pembrey on Sunday (Jane will tell you why). The few places we tried were busy, and we ended up spending Saturday night at Hotel Miramar in Llanelli. I just want to say that this area of Wales needs much more competition in the hotel market.

1. The only accommodation they could offer was an apartment: “Adjacent to the Hotel Miramar we have three apartments decorated and furnished to a high standard with all facilities”. These may have been high standards circa 1972, they may have been acceptable as student accommodation, but in truth it was depressing. I can’t even say “it had character”. I think it was all the stains that did it for me. It’s sort of sad, but I would have much rather stayed at a motorway motel or similar. It would have been about the same price: £75 for the three of us.

2. On the plus side, the staff were helpful. The bathroom was on it’s way towards small pool before they fixed the leak, and we were in danger of freezing before the heating was fixed (yeah, it’s July, but it was cold). But they fixed them. That’s good. Or am I lowering my standards?

3. Breakfast wasn’t bad. But who’s idea was it to put cheap instant coffee in a coffee pot? It’s not clever, it’s not fancy, it doesn’t taste good. Note to self: always go for tea; it’s hard to get tea really wrong. One strange thing we saw during breakfast: someone, probably hotel staff, went into the apartments through the backdoor — leaving the door open — and out through the front door, leaving that unlocked. Nothing bad happened, but it’s just disconcerting to watch.

4. “The Hotel Miramar is adjacent to Llanelli Railway Station.” Yeah, this is the big mistake. Anything around a station is not going to be good. We drove around a bit, and we hope we missed the best parts of Llanelli, because if we didn’t it’s a depressing place. We didn’t feel like going out at all, other than to the off license which was literally next door.

A positive note: we had dinner at the Pemberton Arms in Burry Town and that was good pub food with a happy young bloke serving us. We tried to eat at the Poacher’s Rest in Ferryside, but they didn’t really want to feed us, and the manager greeted us with a knife in his hand.

In summary, avoid the area, or pay lots in a plush hotel.

We saw Jurassic Park III on Friday. Yeah, the dinosaurs look a bit better, but don’t bother. No story, or what story there is you’ve seen before. Bah.

By chance we were very bored on Saturday (more about that later) and caught the original Jurassic Park on TV and the contrast was striking: that film is just so much better than JP3.

This tickled me: yesterday I had to pop to the shops, and on the high street there were a few volunteers from some animal welfare group rattling collection tins, looking for donations. I walked past one who asked if I’d spare some time to help with animal welfare, and at that precise moment a dog let out an almighty yelp as a woman in a wheelchair ran over it’s paw. The guy with the tin didn’t even go and look at the dog. Pah.

Well, after having been back from our trip to New Zealand for 6 months, we finally got around to capturing the video we took onto the PC. This means that as well as having 10 Gigabytes of avi files to edit, we’ve also got some new photos to add to this site. So, we’ve now got a re-designed New Zealand section on this site, complete with loads of photos.

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We’re hoping to go the Brighton Kite Festival later on this month, and I was having a look at the event website this morning. One activity of the festival that really caught my eye was The Bearly Made It Skydive Squad. This sounds like lots of fun, and I particularly like the footnote:
“BMISS operates an equal opportunities policy: as long as it’s a cuddly toy, we’ll parachute it – monkeys, cows, rabbits… even pigs might fly! You name it – we’ve ‘bunged’ it!!

I blogged a week or so ago about Kites being used to lift an obelisk. The National Geographic website now has an article about it, and also a photo of the lift in progress.

I was just having a chat with someone I work with about the Bill Bryson books I have on my desk – someone had borrowed them and I haven’t taken them home yet. He was saying his favourite is “Notes from a Small Island“, about Bill’s last trip around the UK before moving back to the US. That was the first one of the Bryson books I read. My favourite is probably still “Neither here nor there“, and it is mainly because of the following section which is about Paris:

“you would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast slug-like creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter

‘No, No,’ you would say hands aflutter, ‘not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread.’

The slug-like creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn’t want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again.

This still makes me chuckle! If you’ve never read a Bill Bryson book, give them a try, they’re good fun.