Not Quite the Birthday We’d Planned!

Today was LV’s birthday. He finally turned 9! I say finally, he hasn’t actually had to wait any longer than the year that every one else is allotted. But as his birthday is in the summer holidays he has watched all his class mates, bar one,  turn 9 before him.

The day started out brilliantly with the obligatory present opening, he had a few Nerf guns that he’d requested specifically, he even showed me Youtube tube videos to make sure I bought the right ones, which was lucky because names like sidestrike, sledgefire and double strike all blend into one when your shopping on Amazon at the last minute! A couple of books that are suitable for boys, because all ours that are for his age group are about fairies and fluffy kittens! A new minions money box and some minecraft minifigures.

He was lucky to get an extra gift of a steelseries controller that we were sent recently. This handy wireless controller connects with an ipad, iphone or ipod (ios7 or later) and allows him to play his games much easier than with the on screen controller, it is pocket size too, which makes it really easy to take with you anywhere!

And then things started going downhill.

LV hadn’t planned what he wanted to do, so after breakfast we made a last minute decision to visit Cantref Adventure Farm. The two L’s had visited with school last year and haven’t stopped raving about the place yet. So, as you do, we popped the name into Lee’s iPhone and set off on our merry way. We ended up in some very narrow lanes that eventually brought us to some even narrower lanes where someone had kindly placed a sign that said “No Entry To Cantref”!

Of course, being in the middle of Wales, we had no mobile signal to then search for the right directions so we ended up driving around for well over an hour and a half and still couldn’t find the place. Let’s just say we were all getting a bit hot under the collar, as well as hungry, so we stopped off in McDonalds to grab some lunch and also take advantage of their free wifi! 

We should have taken a minute to read the website before we left. 

“Please use SAT NAV with caution because it can send you on very narrow lanes  and slow your journey.  Our post code is LD3 8LR (Please use Postcode only – do not use our name)”

You can see how many times we went wrong here, each colour change was a new direction we took, we started as the dark green and ended as the blue (apologies to any colourblind readers for this image) As you can see we were aiming for MILES away from where we needed to be!!!

So we gave up and headed home, stopping into Margam Park on the way, which is only 17 miles from our house, but it had basically taken us 4 hours to get there (including stopping to eat), that was one hell of a scenic route!!!

It wasn’t the day out we’d expected when we got in the car this morning, but the kids had a great time anyway. Here’s just a selection of images I took today. Margam has lots of space to run around in, very handy for practicing your vamipre killing moves too, apparently. Even Dr Who likes to pay a visit occasionally.

Is it autumn already?

I have recently discovered Geocaching and have the app on my phone so for something extra to do, I had a look to see if there were any caches at Margam and we managed to find the Margam Mushroom one. It is the first we have ever found! We were expecting a nice little plastic box with some funky stuff inside. Instead there was what looked like a McDonalds toy bag with the log book pages, which were all full, a stone and a 10p piece. I added a new piece of paper and a pencil, hopefully someone will replace the container soon. I hope the next one is a little more exciting!

Of course we ended the day with cake! A minion cake to be precise, and delicious it was too.

Happy Birthday LV xxx

Have you ever gotten as horribly lost as we did today? I’d love to hear about it!

***Disclaimer: We were sent the game controller to try out before choosing to add it to this blog post***