About a month ago I had the chance to drive to Wales on business. I had no idea how much different it was than England. Not only do they have their own language, English is their second language. Welsh looks and sounds Finnish with few vowels. There is a small sign at the top of this post that shows a street sign with English and Welsh.
The highways in England are so small compared to America but that is nothing compared to Wales. There are a ton of mountains (the picture of the lake at the top of my blog was a picture taken from the car while we were driving in Wales). I don’t go anywhere without my GPS (called a SatNav here). The GPS took Bill (my partner here) and I over the smallest roads you have ever seen. They were literally big enough for one car. If you encounter another car one has to back up until there is a place to pull over. Finally we made it back to civilization and much to our chagrin we were back at the same place. We couldn’t stop laughing. Needless to say it took us four hours to go 157 miles. That is normally a 3 hour drive so we didn’t do that bad. On the way home I let Bill drive for the first time. Ever been in a car driving with someone who only puts one hand on the wheel going too fast down mountain roads? I got a migraine, probably from the stress.
It rains more in Wales than even England. Wales is on the east and south east side of England – right across the sea from Ireland. We visited with two delightful individuals with whom we drove over to meet on business. They drove us to their boardroom (a pub overlooking a beach) and we had lunch,. I have posted a picture of me trying “mashed peas”. Yuk! Very popular here.
The people were nice and laugh at our accents….of course we don’t have them, they do.