Author: joannemann

Today we left beautiful St. Davids. Our first stop was to see the Neolithic burial site called Pentre Ifan, which has the same kind of stones as Stonehenge. Getting there put me a little on edge because we had to get back on those narrow roads that can only fit one car at a time. We went around a few blind curves where you just hold your breath, cross your fingers, and hope nobody is coming from the other direction.

Our next stop was in Cardigan. Today is Maxine’s 18th birthday, and she was hoping to do some shopping, but most of the shops are closed since it’s Sunday. We also stopped in the smaller seaside town of Aberaeron, where we came across a sweet kitty cat.

We arrived in the town of Aberystwyth this afternoon, where we’ll eat at Little Italy (birthday girl’s choice), and then drive the rest of the way tomorrow for our four-night stay in Caernarfon.

Today we drove to Tenby, an hour southwest of St. Davids on the southern coast of Wales. It was initially a Viking settlement, which later became a Norman port. English followed later, and even though it’s within Wales, it retains its Victorian seaside resort persona. The center of town is within the ruins of a castle wall, the walls being built in the 13th century to defend against the Welsh (the Welsh, understandably, didn’t appreciate the English presence).

*Full disclosure: this information has been gleaned from AI and Edwin.

The castle is long gone, eroded by the sea, salt air, and lichen. We explored the fort that still stands, which you can only walk to during low tide. It was super creepy: a dark staircase down to even darker candlelit rooms, which they still have decorated for Halloween with spooky cloaked dummies. They filmed an episode of Sherlock here as a maximum security prison. Very fitting.

The town is about as charming as it gets, even with loads of tourists. The rows of pastel homes and grand hotels perched above the sea with green rolling fields and forests in the background are truly stunning.

We made it back to the cottage in the evening, where we got to scratch Rosie the pig behind the ears and get Jan’s recipe for bara brith (speckled bread full of dried fruits soaked in tea). Now it’s time to play spades.

Yesterday we went to Skomer Island to see puffins. When i booked the trip back in January, I hadn’t realized how many puffins we’d see and how close they would let us get. Jan gave us a clue when she said we were going at the perfect time and that they’d be everywhere. She said we’d come back with faces sore from smiling so much.

We drove the hour (more skinny lanes and pulling over into hedges to let oncoming cars pass) to the car park and got ready to board the boat. The boat captain, Jim, was an entertainer and had trained a seagull to ride on the boat for the 15-minute trip to Skomer Island. The bird is called Tonto (the lodge attendant revealed to us that there are actually three seagulls he’s trained, all referred to as Tonto) and would alternately perch on the boat and glide above us. He joined us for the trip back and proceeded to poop on another passenger’s head and briefly land on Edwin’s head.

From the moment we stepped onto the island, we were enchanted by the puffins. They estimate there are 43,500 puffins. Though they kept their chicks in the burrows (I managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of the top of a fuzzy gray head) they were comfortable crossing paths in front of us and hanging out on the hills just a few feet from us.

Though the puffins were the stars, we saw manx sheerwaters, various gulls, oystercatchers, gannets, guillemots, and kittiwakes. Some of these nest on cliff-sides and are very noisy. I remarked that they sounded like middle school lunchtime, and then I read in the guidebook that the kittiwakes have a shrill voice and sound like children in a school playground from a distance. There you go.

After our four-hour mosey around the island, it was time to re-board the boat. I picked up a puffin Christmas ornament and a pack of puffin playing cards at the shop, feeling uplifted. Jan was not wrong.

Welcome to Wales! Edwin has been planning a Wales trip since he discovered we have ancestors on both sides from here. He’s been studying the language and history and is thrilled we’ve finally made it.

When we left Oxford Thursday morning, we quickly found ourselves on very narrow roads with walls or hedges running right up to the edges. I tried very hard not to shriek as we came upon oncoming traffic. The vehicle closer to a tiny patch of shoulder room would yield to the other. I breathed a huge sigh of relief when we took roads beginning with an M, A or even B. M stands for motorway, A for a little smaller, and B for a little smaller than that. It’s the unlettered roads that can be two-way, 60 mph, and really only wide enough for one car.

We stopped in the town of Brecon, Wales to walk around and have lunch before driving into Brecon Beacons National Park for a short hike. Edwin translated for us, even though everything is listed in both Welsh and English. I think he’s working up the courage to speak to a local. Our friend in Oxford said the gen Xers don’t love having you try to speak Welsh to them because they were raised when they were forbidden to speak it. It wasn’t until the nineties when they went through a rebirth in national pride and opposition to England’s efforts to suppress their culture.

After lunch and a walk around town, we drove a half hour more, this time dodging sheep as well as oncoming vehicles to the waterfall hike. Chris really wanted to hike longer, but we were still running on too little sleep, and I wanted to leave plenty of time for finishing our drive in daylight.

After another couple hours of driving, we arrived at the Lidl grocery store in Haverfordwest, a decent sized town about a half hour drive from our rental home. I didn’t realize the roads could get any narrower, but as we drove the final stretch of the way to the cottage, it appeared we were driving down a footpath. When we pulled up to the cottage, Ty Draw (“house beyond”), I wanted to kiss the ground. John and Jan came out to welcome us, along with little Meggie, a tiny version of what looked like an Airedale Terrier. They told us Meggie was a rescue, along with the horses, pigs and other dogs on the property. They’ve been taking in abused and neglected animals for years.

After settling in and having a simple dinner, we explored the property. John and Jan said we could walk wherever we liked, so we crossed a few fields and came upon horses on our way to have a view of the sea. It was nearing 9:30, just before the sun sets here, when we made our way back and crashed hard for our first night of decent sleep.

Brecon Beacons National Park

Wow, it’s nice to be away. We arrived at Heathrow two mornings ago and have made the most of our time so far. I couldn’t believe how smooth our journey was. We hit zero traffic on our way to Dulles, got bumped to Economy Plus, left and arrived on time, and faced no line entering the country and merely had to scan our passports.

We took the wrong shuttle bus to the car rental agency, which actually worked in our favor. We had to walk about 50 yards down a footpath along the road to Enterprise, but that put us there just before a bus load of passengers, so we got our car in no time. Chris drove us safely (on the other side of the road!) to Oxford to stay with an old friend for the first night.

After catching up with Christoph and Liz, both archaeology professors at Oxford, we dropped our bags and rested for a bit before having some lunch in the garden and catching a ride with them to town to explore while they went into work for the afternoon.

We shook off the jet lag as best we could as we wandered through the covered market, along the River Thames, and through the city. Christoph had told us to be on the lookout for Oxford students who were in the process of taking their exams. Per tradition, they wore black and white and a carnation whose color signified where they were in the process: white for the beginning of exams, then pink, and deeper and deeper until they reached a ruby red, the idea being that you’ve poured all your blood into the process. Sure enough, we saw multiple clusters of black and white clad students wearing various shades of carnations on their lapels.

Later that evening, we had Nepalese takeout in the garden and sipped wine late into the night as their two rescued black cats reemerged from their day of stalking and lounging in the fields to join us by candlelight. Despite my jet lag, it was a beautiful start to our adventure.

When the New Year rolled around, instead of settling on a resolution or looking for a reset, I was focused on my outrage and disbelief. I’ve been feeling disoriented in a country that, until November, I had always had pride in. We, as a nation, have been far from perfect since the beginning, but I had always felt that good sat more heavily than bad on the scale and would always prevail.

The concepts of good and bad can be many-layered and heavily subjective, but some things just can’t be anything but greedy and cruel. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck…

So, what now? What can we do, those of us who are having trouble recognizing the U.S.A. in 2025? I have some ideas: listen to and support those who are marginalized; continue to teach my students how to actively and respectfully listen to one another, how to identify bias in what they read and hear, seek multiple perspectives, and be kind to themselves and to others. I can love my family and friends and remain curious.

What about those who make me the angriest and most confused? What about the neighbor who thinks most trans people are criminals? Who thinks shutting down the USAID is a cost-cutting necessity? Does she know or care how devasting this is to so many who have so much less than her? I have seen her organize meal trains for sick friends, be the first to offer up her home when half the neighborhood was without power. How do I reconcile this with her politics? I also think the crisis we’re in right now is much bigger than “politics.” We are not dealing with mere politics here.

So many questions, so much frustration. Setting my feelings down here is a start.

I’m back on Chincoteague Island for a very quick trip with my mom. My niece, who is more like a sister to me and daughter to my mom, is here with her husband and two kids. She wasn’t able to line up her week with ours earlier in the summer, so we came down for two nights to visit. We don’t get to see them often, since they moved to Ohio in November. My mom has really been missing the last of the “babies” (they’re nine and eleven).

My younger sister and I had planned to take both our parents, but my dad’s health has been complicated lately, and nobody felt comfortable taking him somewhere where the nearest hospital is an hour away.

When you only have two days here, you have to embrace every opportunity. After dinner, I swam in the ocean with the kids and made one of them into a mermaid and the other into an octopus in the sand and then watched the sun go down over Tom’s Cove.

I got up at 5:30 this morning as quietly as I could and slipped out to see the sunrise over the ocean. Then I biked around the wildlife loop and then to my favorite coffee and pastry shop.

Next: pick up some sandwiches and get ready for the beach.

Being back at Lake Winnepesaukee brings back so many memories, some foggier than others.

In the very early days, we camped in a canvas tent at Lane’s End campground in Melvin Village. I remember bursting out of the car after 12 hours in an unairconditioned Pinto station wagon, impatiently waiting for my dad to pitch the tent so I could throw on my older sister’s hand-me-down bikini and tear down to the end of the lane to jump in the lake with my sister while my mom tended to our baby sister.

The water was always cool and clear, the pine trees aromatic in the warm afternoon breeze.

When we got older, we started renting out one of Nori’s cabins. She was an older lady who lived in a red Cape Cod house at the edge of the lake just down the shore a bit from the campground. She had two matching cabins on her property; we would rent one, and my aunts and cousins would stay in the other.

We spent long summer days jumping off the end of the pier, walking down the road to the Hansel and Gretel Shop where we were allowed to pick out one souvenir and fish in the plastic pool for magnetic goldfish.

Nori passed away years ago, and a wealthy family has purchased her property. All three red houses are still there, but their days are numbered.

For now, everything looks the same.

We spent two days walking all over Boston and had a great time. It’s such a friendly city and so easy to navigate. We walked almost 20 miles and got very well acquainted with the T, their public transit system.

Now we’re in Wolfeboro, NH to enjoy some lake time and see my aunts (and to start my campaign to get Chris to fall in love with it up here – retirement??).

We rented a little cabin on a very small lake that connects to the larger Lake Wentworth. We’ll spend most of today at the town beach in Melvin Village on Lake Winnepesaukee, where we used to camp when I was a kid and later graduated to renting a cabin.

We let the kids sleep in this morning and walked the rails-to-trail path to town for coffee. It’s my favorite walk to coffee ever.

When I opened the back door this morning to empty some compost, I fully expected a wall of hot and humid air to envelop me, and I was stunned to be met with a cool, crisp, fresh new day.

I enjoyed sweeping leaves and a little light weeding and mulching in the middle of the day. Not ready to let it go this evening, I convinced Edwin to take a walk with me and then spent a half hour watering plants.

The fireflies started coming out as a finished, and the fairy lights I have in mason jars flicked on as the sun disappeared.

Can I be so bold as to hope for another one just like today?