This mine, the most exciting part of our whole trip, is a closed coal mine refitted as a museum. It is as close to the coal miner's life as you're going to get without actually signing up for work. The exciting part was that this site is on the books as a working coal mine, and (because of the dangers) we tourists have to obey all the miners' safety rules: no dry-cell batteries in the mine (no watches, cell phones, cameras, flashlights,etc.) and everyone must be kitted-out with wet-cell sparkless lantern, bump cap, and gas mask! It's no use trying to tell the methane, mold, and coal-damp below that we're just tourists.

That giant may be reawakened in the near future, as we noticed extensive restoration work going on in one transcept. There's even a roof over one gallery. We didn't learn how far the restoration will continue, but guessed that large parts of the structure may be roofed soon to prevent the whole from melting in the persistent rain.

The guidebooks complain that the area is overrun with tea shops, but we could find only one. We never did figure out exactly when tea-time was. At 4 o'clock, when official tea-time begins, all the tea shops in the country seem to close. Maybe they do it to vex the English, or maybe they do it because all the tourists leave at 5pm. At any rate, it's mighty hard to find anything to eat between 4pm and 7pm (we needed something to keep our strength up, after all).

From Romantic inspiration we travelled to Victorian fantasy. Castell Coch is an outrageously lavish Victorian dream of a restored medieval castle. The golden room here contains portraits that seem to hang in the painted trees, crowned above by a star-carpeted sky with a golden sun in the center.

After walking through room after room of wildly-extravagant ornament, our hotel room seemed rather plain. You could get used to this sort of excess: the queen's bedroom, for example, enclosed a golden four-poster bed in which each post was topped by a crystal ball, and contained a washbasin flanked by twin miniature castle towers.
And speaking of fantasies... what do you suppose heaven looks like to a writer? You guessed it: an entire town of bookstores. And that's exactly what the little town of Hay-on-Wye is. A castle filled with books. A single store with half-a-million books. Whole stores devoted to mystery books, or history books, or art books.

By the end of the trip we had collected two duffle-bags filled with books. Then we discovered that you don't just pack them up and ship them home. ...unless you want them to arrive by post next season. ...or you want to by them their own private plane ticket over the water. We wound up hauling them home as part of our luggage. Lucky we packed light.

On this trip we discovered the magic words "service wash". It's a very inexpensive (relatively speaking) way to get your clothes cleaned at a laundrette while you're touring about town. For the price of washing two pair of socks in the phenomenally-expensive hotel laundry, you can have a week's worth of clothing washed and folded, making it possible to tour for four weeks on one week's worth of clothes.

All good things must come to an end, and in the third week we thought our trip had ended. You may not have heard the news in the States, but protesters had blockaded all the oil refineries in Britain, and within a few days had practically shut down the entire United Kingdom - there was no gas to be had anywhere.

Not sure how long the protest would last, we confined ourselves at first to short trips, then wound up staying in the hotel for two days (it was actually kind of a nice rest from the pace of the vacation). Here you can see a gas line in the town of Merthyr Tidfil as the blockade was ending and some gas could be had at some times in some places. By the end of our trip, things weren't quite back to normal, but you could fill up at almost any station on the freeway.

Raglan castle is the last medieval fortification to be built in Britain, displaying the relatively ornamented style of the 1400's, and towers built for guns rather than archers. Continuing Raglan's history of lasts, it was also the location of the last battle of the English civil war.

Later tenants added a lovely promenade around the moat, complete with statues of Roman emperors. The statues are gone now, as is half of the hexagonal keep, whose upper range is dominated by a very creepy flock of pigeons (if we can describe pigeons as creepy). Before bumping into the pigeons, we had a grand tour of the compact little castle; after the pigeons, we slowly strolled off without looking back to show our fear.

"They're just pigeons" we hear you say. So did we... until we abruptly met them at the top of that ruined tower.