Gowers, Wales

Last week we embarked on a grand adventure to Wales with the Explorer's society (a fabulous club all about walking, hiking and of course exploring).  Our first trip across the Bristol Channel took us to the tiny town of Gower, a charming West-Wales village complete with a sandy beach, shipwreck, and an island only reachable at low tide. 

We started the day walking down the beach, we combed the sand for sea-shells -which are now adding much needed decoration to our flat! It was a pretty warm day for February, in the mid 40's to mid 50's (Fahrenheit), but we were still shocked to see surfers catching waves.  Granted they had full body-suits complete with hood, gloves and footies, but those we saw emerging from the water still looked frozen solid!




Poking out of the sand on the beach, you can see what remains of the masts of the Helvetia -a ship from the late 1800's that wrecked offshore.  It was apparently full of timber and the locals profited by selling the wood that floated in.   

After a quick lunch, we headed towards The Worm's  Head islands.  You can only cross the rocky ground to the actual islands during low tide, and the higher tides had left us lots of fun little tide pools to look in on our way.  The Worm's Head is made up of two islands with slanted slabs of rock (the part that gets covered up by the tide) separating them from each other and from the mainland.  From the top of the last island you can see the beach and a lot of the Wales landscape.  Beautiful! Occasionally a happy little seal bobbed its head up out of the ocean to say hello.  There were lots of sheep all around -even on the island and some had long tails that made them look almost like foxes dressed in sheep's clothing.   

We discussed differences between the U.S. and England with our British companions the whole way back to Bristol. Here are a few of the things we learned:

Pants = Underwear

Trousers = What we call pants in the US

Jelly isn't really used in the UK -just jam- our friends didn't really know what jelly was so we had to explain that it was jam without the seeds or preserves.

Eating biscuits and gravy does not happen in England -they looked at us like we were crazy! Also the closest thing they have to our "biscuits" is scones which they only eat with jam or fruit never gravy.

Marmite= Our explorer friends thought that the United States is an excellent place because it doesn't have it! They found extracts from bacteria just as gross as we did...

Every area has a distinct accent and they all sound different to each other -but to us they mostly just sound British!