The Accidental Immigrant - Part 2
So what’s different about South Wales? Lots of things! For a start, when you’re new to an area, every trip is an expedition....for the first few weeks I went everywhere with a map book of The Valleys clutched in my hand....even finding curtain shops was a challenge (The House has a lot of windows....BIG windows.....it took a lot of curtains, and virtually none of the ones from our old house could be reused!).
Even when you get your bearings, the landscape is so different to the gentle countryside around us when we lived in the Wirral. For a start, it’s spectacular.....almost everywhere you go, the scenery is impressive. Don’t get me wrong....not all the towns are beautiful (though I am developing a bit of a soft spot for Abergavenny), but the journeys....any journeys take you through amazing landscapes.
Outside The House is a lake (not, we don’t own it.....but it’s in a country park so we can stroll round it, as well as look at it out of the windows). Also mountains.....with sheep. Seriously.... we can look out of our bedroom windows in the morning and watch sheep pottering about! (Though most of the time it’s still dark when we’re getting up, of course! Roll on summer!)
All this spectacular scenery has another effect. You can’t drive anywhere “as the crow flies”. Places that appear to be close on the map cannot be reached directly. You have to drive down one valley and up another.....or the other way round, for variety.
This also affects finding anything......you want someone to come and do a job on the house? “Oh, we don’t go there....it’s more than two valleys away” (it would take all of 25 minutes to drive) . The same with finding a vet.....between the ones who don’t to wildlife work (we do bat rescue as well as having pets), and the ones who don’t do any valley except their own (even though we always go to the vet, we never expect the vet to come to us) it’s taken us until now to find one near enough (only in the next valley) who will look after all the animals.
Those were the first challenges we faced when we moved here in the autumn, but of course, there were others. .......
Even when you get your bearings, the landscape is so different to the gentle countryside around us when we lived in the Wirral. For a start, it’s spectacular.....almost everywhere you go, the scenery is impressive. Don’t get me wrong....not all the towns are beautiful (though I am developing a bit of a soft spot for Abergavenny), but the journeys....any journeys take you through amazing landscapes.
Outside The House is a lake (not, we don’t own it.....but it’s in a country park so we can stroll round it, as well as look at it out of the windows). Also mountains.....with sheep. Seriously.... we can look out of our bedroom windows in the morning and watch sheep pottering about! (Though most of the time it’s still dark when we’re getting up, of course! Roll on summer!)
All this spectacular scenery has another effect. You can’t drive anywhere “as the crow flies”. Places that appear to be close on the map cannot be reached directly. You have to drive down one valley and up another.....or the other way round, for variety.
This also affects finding anything......you want someone to come and do a job on the house? “Oh, we don’t go there....it’s more than two valleys away” (it would take all of 25 minutes to drive) . The same with finding a vet.....between the ones who don’t to wildlife work (we do bat rescue as well as having pets), and the ones who don’t do any valley except their own (even though we always go to the vet, we never expect the vet to come to us) it’s taken us until now to find one near enough (only in the next valley) who will look after all the animals.
Those were the first challenges we faced when we moved here in the autumn, but of course, there were others. .......
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