Wednesday 23 of July
(writing this on August 9th2003)
Hello all and sorry for the delay.
We travelled from Chippenham to Carmarthen Wales today. We had many many types of rain all day. Misty, soft, pouring, soft, pouring and such. The temperature was cool at below 10 degres. We made it to a smallish town called Carmarthen and decided to stay two days to dry out and get organized. We are in an Inn above a pub (Patrick is happy) but again it's a bit pricy at £50.50 which includes breakfast. We are still in the land of British Pounds and have just closed our eyes to the costs.
We find a laundry the next morning and have all our clothes washed except the ones on our back. We were tempted to just stand there in towels and do everything but it wasn't that kind of town. We then headed off to the local library as the internet cafe wasn't working and would be off line for at least a week. FANTASTIC LIBRARY. So not only is everyone in Wales pretty gosh darn friendly, we spent about 3 hours in the library and had free fast connection to the internet. That's how we were able to update the story for the last week or so. Love Wales, love the library.
We head back to the Inn after a hot cup of coffee. I'm living in my fleece and even Patrick has his coat on.
It becomes Friday morning quite quickly and we are getting ready with our clean clothes and packing. (side note - having clean clothes was more exciting then Stonehenge - I know not what a traveller wants to admit but god, clean socks ....)
Friday morning it is pouring rain so hard that we were awake most of the night with it. We are watching the BBC news in Wales and they have put out a weather warning against driving..... that's not good.... flooding and the whole bit. We are actually only about an hour away from the ferry at Fishguard. We hang about the Inn and have our breakfast. At about 11:00 there is a break in the clouds and we run to the bike and head off. Slight rain but not too bad. Road traffic was light.
We make the ferry terminal but have missed the fast ferry. We end up on the slow one which will take about 3 1/2 hours and leaves at 2:00. To kill time we talk to a motorcyclist from Ireland who has just come off the other ferry. Lovely man and we had a nice chat. The ferry was £61.00 for 2 people and the bike. We didn't have a reservation but it wasn't busy at all so we had no problems getting on. I think if you have a car and book in advance you would get a better deal on the fare but I didn't see anything for motorcycles. We have to take the ferry again so I'll see what we get if we book in advance.

We get across to the Motherland as we call it. (Ireland). My mother is from there and I carry an Irish passport as well. Beautiful sunshine greats us. Off the ferry to find the tourist info.