We started out taking the train down into Wales.  Most costly bit of the trip, with train fares being what they are.  We arrived in Pembroke Dock, shared a pizza (one of the more expensive meals of the trip) and found a chunk of grass next to the sea to pitch our tent.  This was after an extremely long search along the beach, up the cliffs and around the surrounding countryside.  Finally we decided that being far enough away from habitation was more necessary than being undetectable.  I woke around 7 and got Robin up.  Good job, since by 8 it had started raining.  We went to a church where we ran into some people we had met on the train down who were there for a mission.  Our ferry was due to leave at 2:30.  The next morning.  After a lovely day wandering around, we hunkered down out of the rain next to the ferry port and I played my tin whistle (fortunately nobody else was mad enough to be out during the storm, so they couldn't complain).  We went back to our campsite as evening came, but decided setting up the tent on wet ground wasn't worth the bother for a 2am wake-up, so we sat around and watched the sunset over the inlet:

The ferry port finally opened soon after midnight, so we huddled in there waiting for our ferry.  I remember reading a story in a newspaper about a woman whose husband died attempting to beat the depth record for unassisted diving.  They knew there was a big risk, but decided it was worth it.  I would have thought the same thrill could have been gained from diving half the depth and living twice as long, but who am I to judge?  I never even learnt to dive till I went to Ireland to work with some Amish Mennonites.  They went swimming in the sea every lunch-break.  And thus we whiled away the hours, and powered out from the jetty in the dark.  Ferrys are always fun.  Probably one of the most exciting ferry I've been on was a tiny boat they used to pick us up from the Isle of Muck in Scotland.  Me and Robin had gone over the day before and spent the rainy night in a yurt, and on the way back I got the chance to dive off, swim round and climb back on as we stopped briefly at Skye, then we made a detour to chuck a rope to a stranded fishing boat who we towed back to shore.  Unfortunately, from this point in the Ireland story onwards, we don't have any photos whatsoever.  A skeptic might suggest we never went, but a student would point out that the tickets were free.  Some of you will have come across Tony Hawks' book, Round Ireland with a Fridge.  Our journey could be said to be very similar, apart from the fact that we consumed, between us, only a single pint of beer, got minimal media coverage, didn't have a fridge, and only got this far:
I think it was Robin who flagged down the first vehicle - we were taking it in turns to doze on the bank, so I was shaken awake to a lorry heading our way.  Next vehicle I caught took half the time to do about twice the miles with a driver half the age and twice the usual helping (inherently high in Ireland already) of disregard for traffic laws.  Nice car though.  A few lifts and a good few hours waiting later we decided we were within striking distance of our initial destination, and set off walking across country.  In a few hours Robin had started to get blisters.  Fortunately I wasn't wearing shoes, so didn't have to worry about that.  We were following a compass on our way to Carmarthen, but hadn't taken into account the very wide and bridgeless river directly between us and it.  I was all for swimming with our packs on our heads, but we were dissuaded with some garbled talk of currents and certain death.  We asked for directions and were pointed back the way we came, eventually succumbing to a bus-ride into town.  I seem to remember getting money out in Waterford at some point in the week and splashing out on a McDonalds.  I found plenty of time to play my penny whistle there too.  The hideout of the Mennonites I mentioned earlier is near delightfully named Leperstown.  They didn't know we were coming, so when one of them spotted us in a nearby town they didn't believe it was us.  I remember buying meringue and cream, so it wasn't all beans cooked in the tin over a dying paraffin stove.  Followed by a refreshing dip in the blue blue Irish sea.  

We decided that, since cars are about as frequent as dolphins on the little roads separating us from our unsuspecting hosts-to-be, we would splash out on another bus-ride.  We found a battered old bus thing that looked promising, apart from the lack of driver.  Didn't phase the locals - they just wandered on and took a seat.  When the driver finally rolled up he waved us on and wandered off again.  Being English we found it deeply uncomfortable getting on a bus without paying, but gradually people sauntered down to the driver, slipped him a quid and wandered back.  He didn't seem too fussed about the whole money thing.  When I say a quid, I suspect it might possibly have been a euro, but the principle is the same.  It certainly felt like a quid.  When he decided he had had enough of taking coins off people he chugged off, and we ended up dropped in the middle of a maze of roads.  We had rung home to tell them where we were, and they had got in touch with a bunch of Aussies who lived with the Mennonites.  They rang Robin's mobile (ooh - technical wizardry!) and we said something like "We're in the middle of a lane somwhere in southern Ireland and we're lost".  Naturally he was there in minutes, and took us in, fed us and provided sofa-space for a night or two.  In between we wandered the secret beaches we had been shown last time we were in the area, including Back Strand, where Tristan, the son of the Australian, nearly drowned a couple of years before.  He swims every day apart from a few weeks in midwinter, and he was out there with his friend Nathaniel one day when the current swept them out.  Nat managed to make it back to shore to raise the alarm, but Tris was out in the freezing sea for 40 minutes, and had even started hallucinating before being picked up by helicopter, but managed to stay afloat.  We got there in the early afternoon, and after a quick dip I slept flat out on the sand for a couple of hours, by which time I was a trifle sunburnt.  We were fed and watered again that evening, and played ping-pong with Tristan and his sisters till bedtime.  

On our way back the next day we stopped in a campsite where we hoped to wash some clothes, but there wasn't any washing powder, so we redefined wearable clothes once more and continued on our merry way.  A single lift away from Rosslare we happened upon a tiny pub, where I had my first and last pint of guinness of the trip (unless you count a half I scraped together the pennies for on the ferry on the way back).  

We got to the ferry a day in advance, and didn't want to get the tent sandy, so slept out on the beach beside the ferryport in our soon-to-be-very-sandy sleeping bags.  We made a little fire on the sand for fun, and met a couple of Germans travelling on a round-Europe rail ticket who asked us to wake them for the 8am ferry the next morning.  They had already slept through one...

The next morning we breakfasted on some cereal, and I had a quick swim.  Then wandered into the ferry terminal in my swimming shorts to use the toilet and wash up my cereal bowl.  Only I went into the wrong toilets.  I remember being distracted by a 15 year old lad giving me a funny look as I walked through the door, and only later realised it was because I wasn't a woman.  So here I am in a cubicle, thinking how clean the Irish keep their bogs, when I hear a woman's voice.  She must have got the wrong toilets, I think.  Then another woman answers her, and my mathematical brain weighs up the probability of two women making the same mistake and not noticing against me making a similar mistake.  So I did what any self-respecting man would do.  I sat tight.  I waited until there was relative silence, and then decided it was time to make a break for it.  Of course, silence isn't a perfect indicator of aloneness, as I discovered.  However much I hid my stubbly face I couldn't hide the fact that I was wearing nothing but swimming shorts, so I just snuck out as fast as I could.  

We arrived back in Pembroke Dock on Friday, and we spread the tent out to dry on a bank while I whittled at sticks and Robin slept.  We splashed out on a B & B that night, not least because it was called The Inn Between.  We had showers and all.  The combination of barefeet, grimy roads and the inherent salinity of the usual washing facilities made the Welsh showers a bit of a necessary luxury as well as a luxurious necessity.  We were hoping for a big breakfast, and weren't disappointed.  Sausages, bacon, eggs, fried bread, mushrooms, toast, tea.  By the end we were so full that, although I finished all mine, I couldn't manage the half slice of toast that Robin was forced to leave.  Not bad considering we were two hungry teenagers who had been living off their stomach lining for most of the last week.  A lift or two into mid-Wales, however, and the more usual state of nagging hunger set in once again.  Our plan was to get as far as Brecon to meet up with the rest of the family, and we were making good time.  Through Carmarthen, we finally stopped in some town beginning with Llan- to shovel down some more cornflakes.  A gaggle of local girls found us sitting on our packs in the town centre (such as it was) and kept saying stuff in their funny Welsh accents.  I would have sounded foolish whatever accent I used then, so what came out was a bizarre mix of Irish and Liverpudlian, with maybe a dram of Scottish thrown in.  They found the accent easier to swallow than the fact that we were brothers, which was interesting.  

We eventually weighed up the relative merits of staying where we were and of walking across a bunch of fields in approximately the right direction for home, and went for the fields option.  A few hedgerows and ditches later we found ourselves at the top of a small hill overlooking the Llandovery vale.  It boasted two young oak trees which accommodated my hitherto unused hammock very comfortably.  I spent a while playing my wooden whistle (delicate though it is, it survived my backpack even when rolled down the hill the next morning), then fell asleep watching the sunset.  It was around now that I remembered my camera:


Brecon was our final destination:

Next day was a Sunday, and I try not to buy things on a Sunday because if I get a day off I think shop-keepers should be able to as well.  This caused a slight issue, since all we had to eat was the remains of the cornflakes.  Robin had those, because I had set my sights on a different quarry - the nearby forage maize crop.  Some might say that avoiding Sunday trading to the point of theft is somewhat compromised, but actually I only took cobs from underdeveloped plants at the edge of the field under overhanging trees, where the combine probably would bother going anyway.  But I also took care to avoid the farmer.  I had upwards of two dozen cobs that day.  A tip for you in case you're ever in a similar situation - pick them at about 5 or 6 inches long with leaves, then the whole cob will be sufficiently young to be edible raw (very similar to baby corn you might pay lots for at Tesco), but still big enough to be worthwhile picking.  I left an incriminating pile of maize leaves at laybys across Wales on the way to Brecon.  

Now, we didn't realise but Brecon was hosting the annual Jazz festival that weekend, so everyone we got a lift with thought we were going for that.  In fact, it could have been the uninviting prospect of sharing a cab with jazz fans that put off so many people stopping for our Brecon sign.  Half an hour later we changed it for South Carolina and got picked up in minutes.  Soon after negotiating a set of temporary traffic lights at a road slump that we were told had been in place for seven years, we pulled up outside Brecon, and proceeded to wander the streets in our respective bedraggled states.  Unshaven, barefoot and shirtless, leaning on a stick and dragging a similarly dishevelled sibling, who should I run into but the Spanish lady I had worked with during my gap year and her (Welsh) boyfriend.  I must add that this is a different Spanish woman to the one who held a team meeting/monologue that went on for six and a half hours before she went on maternity leave.  As far as I remember, the most useful thing she suggested was that I clean out the Branston pickle covered circuit box of some machine with a toothbrush.  It took days.  

Anyway, bad memories aside - were caught the tail end of the jazz, running into a samba band and a bunch of brass players we had seen previously busking in Scotland and then again in France when we were small.  I remember begging a glass of milk off a stall outside a church.  That was good.  It was a hot day, so we eventually left the dying merriment of the festival and made our way down river to find a place to pitch camp.  But first, we went for a dip in the cool cool water and got a group photo (kindly taken by... er, me):

Well, we beat the family there.  We spent a night somwhere near that river, then hung around the area the next day, me playing my whistle, waiting for the ol' minibus to turn up.  It was easy to spot, despite the fact that it was night-time and it was diverted away from the town centre, since it has an enormous green stripe down one side and it was towing a caravan.  We saw it in the distance and chased it through Brecon till they stopped at the lights (that makes two sets - go Wales).  There followed a beautiful reunion and a lovely (though somewhat cramped) whole family holiday.  And here we are atop a Brecon Beacon with Anna, Thomas and Jake:

Since this page was written by only half of those present, you may have been given a slightly biased (and in some cases plain false) view of what happened.  My brother emailed me to correct a few inaccuracies...