Our last place to visit in Wales was a rather vague UNESCO listing of the "Blaenavon Industrial Landscape" and we were not sure what to expect other than we understood it to be about coal mining and that maybe we would have a quick look and go. Not so.At Blaenavon a unique situation existed where all the raw materials existed for ironworks. Later in the 1850's it was here that the process of producing cheap steel was invented and the town became the centre of...

Sometimes we are not sure whether we want to be young or old! Manchester saw us catch up with the Hammond girls from Australia and we wanted to be young to have a great night out (and we did! - more about that later) Liverpool saw us get into the Beatles Museum at Seniors Price - Yippee!!!. We are OK about being old for reduced entry price!We arrived back in Manchester from Ireland and reunited ourselves with our (London) hire car and drove to our lovely, but in...

Wales has some BIG brooding castles mostly all built in a frenzy of castle building by King Edward towards the end of the 13th century. A total of 8 castles and walls were built in this era and are UNESCO Heritage listed. We picked out two castles to visit, Conwy and Beaumaris.Looking at the map and deciding where we should be looking for accommodation for the night, we decided it should be a place name that starts with double L. Wales is full of them and as Avan...

2nd day in our "Amazing Race" style adventure in Ireland, saw us go right across from West to East of Ireland to arrive at the Archaeological Sight at the Bend of The Boyne by mid afternoon. The truly amazing thing about this area is that it wasn't "discovered" until the 1960's. Up until then present man had accepted these strange shaped green hills as part of the scenery. Digs are still happening today and the various significant sites have been protecte...

Ahhh Ireland and the Irish - you just can't help saying "that's a bit Irish" as you would when something is a bit odd, then you suddenly realise, well, we ARE in Ireland so its allowed to be a bit Irish!For example, we flew into the little known West Knock airport. Our flight was with a budget airline called "BMI Baby" - can you possibly think of a more bizarre name for an airline? After picking up a hire car we found the little village of Knock close by ...