Manchester and Wales

In the morning we got up and went down to the Clava Cairns, which were only a couple of miles from our B&B, although we went the long way around since we are foolish tourists 🙂 . The Cairns are the remains of an ancient burial ground from as long ago as 2000 B.C.! 4,000 years old!!! Definitely the oldest things I’ve been
around yet. Older than Tulum in Mexico (564A.D. to 1450A.D.), older than Casa Grande(1200-1400A.D.) in Arizona and older than the oldest Shinto shrine I’ve been to in Japan (~100A.D.). None of the cairns are really complete any more, as they used to be something like rock igloos and now the roofs have pretty much collapsed and they are more like donuts. Given the number and size of the rocks that were used to build them (most of the rocks are between head and hand size, so there are a LOT), you can tell the people of that time went to a lot of trouble to build them. They appear to have been used as tombs, similar to the Pyramids in Egypt, although obviously on a much smaller scale.

The green glade the cairns are in is incredibly peaceful and has a heather and moss covered ground that is springy… very Lorien-like. A really cool place worth checking out. It would have been nice to sit there in peaceful meditation for a long while, but we had to run to the airport. Maybe one day in the future.

At the airport we took a plane to London and then to Manchester. Our plan originally had been to fly to Manchester and then go to north Wales for the afternoon, spending the night there and then the next day driving down to Swansea and Cardiff. However, we’d decided a few weeks beforehand that there wouldn’t be enough time to do that, so we had changed our hotel solely to Swansea. However, we were still flying into Manchester. This turned out to be a big, big mistake. Nothing against Manchester, if nothing else, they have Man U:), but unbeknownst to me, London is actually closer to Swansea than Manchester is, by about 50 miles…. sigh. Even worse, BMI lost JC’s luggage at Heathrow and because we were going more than 150miles from Manchester, he wasn’t going to get his luggage for 2 days. It actually wound up being MUCH worse than that since they screwed up and didn’t get it to him until a couple of days after we got to Paris! Sorry JC…

The only saving grace from the whole Manchester fiasco was that we got a REALLY nice Saab as our rental car from Hertz. Way cool in so many ways. Auto traffic radio notifications, digital everything. Very nice. Good thing too, because driving 250 miles from Manchester to Swansea (leaving Manchester around 6pm) was NOT fun. Wales was interesting, but mostly it was dark by the time we got there… Incidentally, the signage in Mumbles (home of Catherine Zeta-Jones) in the dark, on a Sunday night, leaves a LOT to be desired. It took us like 30 minutes to find the B&B and we were within 2 miles of it when we got lost…. We got to the B&B around midnight… luckily we called ahead and they had kindly left the door unlocked for us.