Sat 5th.

Day 1 of the holiday. Despite the weather forecast being for rain, we woke up to glorious sunshine and a hot day. Unusually for us, we were not very well organised and only really started packing this morning. The car seemed absolutely rammed by the time we had finished - it looked as full as when we go camping - can't quite understand how, but there we are.

The journey started out with a traffic jam less than 5 miles from home. It took over half an hour to get to the end of the A46. After that, it wasn't too bad, the M5 was fairly busy but was moving steadily.

We elected to take the scenic route across the centre of Wales and via Brecon. This was pretty much the same route that we took last year, and we stopped at the same parking spot as last time and had our lunch.

It seemed to take forever to get here, and in fact was almost 5 hours including the stop for lunch.

The apartment block was a bit of a shock when we first saw it. Both of us thought "Prisoner Cell Block H"!!! It is quite run down looking from the outside, and when we got inside it was smaller than I had expected. When I got past my initial thoughts, it is actually very nice inside. It is clean, nicely decorated and furnished and has just about everything you could want.

One major snag is that there is no mobile phone signal. At all. Neither is there one anywhere from here to Pembrook. We ended up having to phone parents from a phone box!!!

We did a bit of food shopping at Asda and headed back to the flat for a lovely cup of tea. Then we headed to the beach to check it out briefly. It is very sandy and pleasant, and we look forward to spending more time on it.

Back to the flat to cook dinner and watch "Britain thinks it has a bit of talent" final. Some of the comments in the guest book have been that the TV picture is not very good. We thought the picture was fine and settled down to "enjoy" the show.

Half an hour in and the signal vanished. Ten minutes of playing around got the picture back but with no sound. We have discovered that if you press the volume up button on the remote for the digi box the sound comes back (even though the level is fully up). Snag is that after about ten seconds it goes off again. We are taking it in turns to keep pressing the button!!!

We managed to get to the end of the program, and in fact the darn thing ended up working properly after totally loosing the signal for a few minutes just before they announced the winner!!

Dinner was chicken and mexican rice followed by ice cream. Lovely it was too.
Time for bed - no spectacular sunset tonight as it is too cloudy. The rabbits are still hopping around munching the grass happily. Apparantly we might even see foxes.....

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