Prince Charles of Wales

our narture walk
I'm a little teapot
Dave on a cliff
tightrope walkway
sorry the mill is closed for a royal visit & we are working hard
Le` prince arrives w/ camillia
the school girls I stood by
dave gets chummy w/ the cops
our walk


St. Davids


Apparently the prince said hello to this poochie

This is a blog about how Prince Charles and Camilla tried to ruin our well thought out day! As I said before we had purchased a castle pass for Wales – so we decided to go to St. David’s – a church with a nearby castle. We packed our lunch and got ready for the two hour drive through the Wales countryside – about half way there I saw a sign for a woolen mill. I said to Dave “Gee, I’d really like to go see a wool mill, can we do it?” he said sure and we detoured to the mill. When we arrived there it was swarmed with police in uniform, a few police vans and truly looked as if a crime had happened there – Dave is not shy around police so he asked “what’s going on here?” – the reply was the first one that was destined to ruin our day “We’re expecting a royal visit sir – Prince Charles will be here in four hours so the mill is closed to the public today.” Why did they need t close the mill for the entire day? It seemed rather cautions and pretentious - Why were there so many police officers there four hours ahead of time? They were just standing around drinking water /coffee / tea and just waiting for the royals. Well, my heart wasn’t totally broken because the woolen mill wasn’t on my actual agenda anyway. David said to the policeman “Okay, thank you, we’re going to head on out to St. David’s then.” The policeman replied “Oh that’s where they’re heading right now, so you might have a little bit of a problem.” Great – The Prince of Wales and Camilla have planned the same thing for their day as we had. We headed to St. David’s anyway – along our route we came into a small town where people were standing on one side of the street with cameras – I said “I think the Prince’s motorcade is going to come this way – let’s get out and watch what happens.” We got out of the car and stood with the Prince watchers – I stood by two teenage schoolgirls and Dave stood by a man with a huge lens. In the sky we could see a helicopter – we thought it was an ariel patrol to watch over the Prince’s motorcade – wrong! It was the Prince and Camilla – their helicopter was getting ready to land on an outcropping of grass on a cliff - that overlooked the ocean. We waited and sure enough out the came, Charles greeted some official people with Camilla, turned to the crowd did the royal wave (elbow bend and a stiff back and forth with his hand) I was a little amazed that we – two people from California happened to see prince Charles and Camilla whilst on our way to see a castle. Of course I snapped a few bad photos of the couple – how could you not?
We did make it to the town where St. David’s is located – but we couldn’t even park because of the Royal visit. (Damn Chuck) – A police officer suggested we head on up the road to the sea and have our picnic lunch. We found a place called St. Justina’s that was superbly awesome. There were cliffs with trails that you could hike along – it was so beautiful there – we kicked back, ate our sandwiches and looked at what Mother Nature had done in this area – we could see islands less than a mile away. There were boats going to the island filled with nature lovers and bird watchers. After lunch we hiked until we were tired – in some spots, the cliff was so high and narrow I couldn’t look down – although I never really felt like I was on shaky ground. After the hike we headed back to St. David’s where most of the buzz over the royal visit was simmering down. We made it to our castle and went into the church. So I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly say “Thank you “ to Prince Charles and Camilla for NOT ruining our day but for detouring us to St. Justina’s – where we had a wonderful view of the Welsh coastline and a great visual outlook for our lunch plus a lovely hike along the cliffs which were carpeted in wildflowers.

We did finally make it to St. Davids and it was wonderful.