Days out Archives - Mami To Five

Our Camping Trip to North Wales

Last week we took a little camping trip. We’d bought tickets to go to the last day of The Royal Welsh Show in Builth Wells on the Thursday so we set off straight after Lee came home form work on Wednesday to save us driving the hour and a half up in the morning. This meant we got to have a relatively calm breakfast before we set off on the half hour journey from Hay on Wye.

I must admit we really didn’t like the campsite we were on, so I’ll refrain from naming it. But even an awful site can’t spoil a camping breakfast of tea and Bacon sarnies cooked outside on our trusty old camping stove (the delivery date on the box is 2005!)

The Summer Days Linky ~ call that a summer?

Please sponsor our Alzheimer’s Memory Walk through JustGiving

Welcome back to the very last Summer Days Linky of 2015 with myself and Karen from Stopping at Two. You can read more about it HERE. You can link your summery posts at the bottom of this post.

A big thank you to everyone who has joined in this summer, it has been a blast getting to read all your wonderful posts. I am playing catch up with some comments as I can’t comment on my phone but I have read them all and I have to say you are all fantastic!

A big round of applause has to go out to my lovely co-host Karen. She has done a brilliant job this summer and I really hope I haven’t frightened her off and she will come back next year and that you lovely lot will come back too 🙂

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I read today that Wales has had 58 days of rain during June, July and August, with July only giving us 6 dry days! In all honesty though, this number seems quite conservative and I’m really surprised it isn’t higher! It has really limited what we were able to actually do. After all, nobody sensible would want to drag 5 soggy children out and about, especially when the majority are well and truly out of the ‘splashing in muddy puddles is the best thing ever’ phase.

So, don’t judge me (because I know some of you will), but it has been a summer of screen time. From watching netflix or youtube on tablets, to playing xbox, even reading has mostly been done on phone screens this summer. No, it wasn’t perfect and we were all getting quite cabin feverish inbetween the rare dry day where I was literally throwing them out of the house just for a little bit of peace and quiet.

But boy oh boy did all those screens come in handy this year!

To combat the rain, one of the last days out we had of the holidays was bowling. No chance of getting rained on there! It was quite pricey at £88, but when you break it down between the 7 of us, it cost less than £12.60 per person for 2 games and a meal, so not that really bad when you think about it.

Next time we wouldn’t bother with the second game though, each one took over an hour and that was plenty long enough for everyone, especially O who hasn’t quite grasped turn taking yet!READ MORE »

Summer Days Linky ~ Finally, a Day Out!

Please sponsor our Alzheimer’s Memory Walk through JustGiving

Welcome back to the Summer Days Linky with myself and Karen from Stopping at Two. You can read more about it HERE. You can link your summery posts at the bottom of this post.

So here we are, the end of the last full week of the summer holidays! It has been a long six weeks, but in a way it has also flown by. I must admit that we are all ready to get back to our usual routine and with the awful weather we have had the kids getting a little cabin feverish now and are actually looking forward to going back to school!

This week Lee was off work and it was supposed to be our week of fun.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

To begin with LV has broken his heel bone and is on crutches. He doesn’t have a cast on, which he is extra gutted about, but he isn’t allowed to put any weight on it for at least another 4 weeks. This has obviously limited the activities we could do.

The second problem was two hospital appointments which took up Monday and Wednesday.

The third and most inconvenient issue was once again, you guessed it, the weather! It has been horrendous here most of the week meaning most of our possible days out had to be crossed off the list.

By Thursday we decided we needed to look for somewhere further afield and after a quick google of ‘where is sunny in the UK now’ we jumped in the car and made our way to Bristol Zoo. I will tell you more about it next week but here are some photos as a teaser.

Blue skies! Such a change from the downpour we had just left in Wales.

Even the lions were enjoying a doze in the sun!

I think I had the better end of the deal with the much needed piggybacks later on in the afternoon. Not only did I get the smallest boy but using my pod (a style of baby carrier) makes life so much easier!

So now on to the Summer Days linky, please feel free to link up any type of post. It could be a round up of your week, a picture you want to share, a yummy recipe, fun craft or an activity you’ve tried. Maybe you simply went out for a lovely walk in the sun or spent a bit of time in the garden. Anything you like that makes you think of summer including fashion, beauty, interiors and travel posts.

Of course there are a few simple rules:

Link up one of your summer related posts from this year.
Please comment on at least the two posts before yours ~ Remember these linkys only work if we all share the love, the more you give the more you get back!
You can use the hashtag #SummerDays when you comment to let people know where you came from.
Please add the badge to the bottom of your post to help spread the word of the linky.
Have fun! It is summer after all 😀

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Coity Castle

Please help us raise some much needed funds for The Alzheimer’s Society by sponsoring our Memory Walk!

Do you love castles? Lee isn’t that interested in them but I LOVE them!

Even the most ruined of strongholds fill me with wonder. I love to imagine the type of people who lived there, what they would have looked like when they were at their peak and the reasons behind why they were build on that particular spot.

We live in the Bridgend area of South Wales and are really lucky to have quite a few castles practically on our doorstep, although some are now merely bits of rubble sticking out of the ground. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t even know a few of them existed until this year, but there are two in particular that we enjoy visiting regularly. Today I want to tell you about Coity Castle.

Everything you Need For a Successful Camping Trip

We love camping, there is something so lovely about sleeping under canvas. Actually you are more likely to be under polyester or nylon nowadays, but that doesn’t sound quite so romantic does it!

We were going to go camping earlier in the holidays but a combination of family issues and rubbish weather, put a (literal) dampener on our plans. However! Lee has booked the last full week of the summer break off work and we are hoping, even if it’s just for a few nights, to actually go somewhere, anywhere!

As I was thinking about gathering up all our camping bits and pieces that are scattered around the house, I decided I would make a list of all the things I deem essentials for a successful camping trip in the hopes it will help others.READ MORE »

My Sunday Photo ~ Margam Castle

Yesterday I posted about our impromptu visit to Margam Park. Here is a close up of Margam Castle, which is actually a Gothic Tudor Mansion. I love visiting this country park, you could could quite happily spend all day here wandering the grounds!

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.

Summer Days Linky ~ Blowing Bubbles

Welcome back to the Summer Days Linky with myself and Karen from Stopping at Two. You can read more about it HERE.

Yesterday I took O over to the park at the end of out street. I say park, it used to have swings, a slide, a climbing frame, all the things you’d expect to find in a park. But about ten years ago they came a cut all the equipment down leaving a multi layered patch of concrete which was eventually sold earlier this year.

I figured this may be our last summer to enjoy having the space to run around in, before someone inevitably builds a house on it, so we strolled over with a pot of bubbles to enjoy the lovely warm weather.

To start with I was the one blowing bubbles and O ran around trying to catch them.

My Captured moment – windy day at the beach

With the Summer Days linky starting back up tomorrow I thought it appropriate to share a photo from a few summers ago for this weeks Captured Moment. These photos of E were taken on what must have been a particularly windy day at the beach, way back in June 2010 when the kids were spending some time with my parents. I just love the look on her face when the umbrella has turned inside out!

Our visit to Dan yr Ogof Caves

As I mentioned last week we recently spent the weekend in South West Wales. While there, one of the places we visited was The National Showcaves Centre for Wales, more commonly known as Dan yr Ogof. It is somewhere neither Lee nor I have ever visited, although a few of the kids have been on school trips a few years ago and were desperate to go back.

If you plan to visit with babies, I would seriously consider bringing a baby carrier as there are many parts that are completely unsuitable for prams with some really steep inclines and lots of steps (there are places to leave the prams at the entrance of the caves). This wasn’t an issue for us as I favour babywearing anyway.

The first of the three caves you can explore is called Dan yr Ogof. There is actually 16km of explored caves systems but the public only have access to a small section. Even so there are some wonderful rock formations to see. The kids were fascinated and the fact that you had the Morris brothers talking about all of the sights as you walked through was great because it meant I could answer some of the questions that were thrown at me, like which ones are stalactites and which ones are stalagmites? In case you didn’t know mites go up and tites go down (which is actually a saying I learnt years ago)!

The second cave is called the Cathedral Cave. It is absolutely beautiful and it has been lit perfectly to show off it’s features. People can actually get married here which I bet is so magical! When you first walk in there are some scenes set up to show how the caves would have been used thousands of years ago, then you walk down a huge passageway with thousands of tiny straw stalactites on the ceiling and water cascading down the walls and into pools.

When you reach the bottom, it opens up into a massive cavern, called The Dome of St Paul. The path you follow down takes you between two waterfalls that are 40ft high! This section is where people get married and truly is a sight you will never forget.

The third and final cave is called The Bone Cave, due to the fact that over 40 skeletons have been found here dating back to the bronze age. It is a very steep walk, up lots of steps to reach this cave, with the final part being a covered walkway where you have to wear hard hats! The kids thought this was great, O thoroughly enjoyed wearing his and even learnt to say hat, well he repeatedly said ‘ah’ after being reminded a hundred times not to take it off, but we all knew what he meant! Most of us were okay just short enough to walk up without having to duck too much, but poor Lee was just that little bit too tall, lucky he had a hard hat on!

In case you were wondering, Lee had donated his hat to a little kid who was going up hatless as we were on the way back down.

The cave itself is actually quite small, the entrance is only about 4 foot high, but it does open up inside, which is lucky as I’m not sure I could have crouched for long with a toddler on my back! Again they have created exhibits inside, this time of how the cave has been used over the years and the dangers the inhabitant faced.

Apart from the caves there is also an iron age village and over 200 life size dinosaurs to see. This had to be LV and O’s favourite part. O even learnt to say dinosaur, well, “dido” counts right? In the museum, the kids thoroughly enjoyed painting their own dinosaur, but not in the normal way!

Unfortunately the weather finally got the better of us so we were grateful for the undercover picnic area.

We also missed seeing the shire horses and the farm, but we did take a look at the burial chamber on our way back to the car. I love how the rain brought out the colour on the carvings.

So there you have it, our day out at Dan yr Ogof caves, a real must if you are ever in the area and you have a budding caver, or dinosaur fanatic in your family! It wasn’t cheap at just over £65 for 6 of us (O was free) but well worth it in our eyes and we will definitely be going back in the future, maybe at Christmas or Halloween when they have special events.

Have you been to Dan yr Ogof? My favourite part was the Cathedral Cave, what was yours?