I’d never been to Wales before.

The circumstances around the trip sucked. My metamour (my girlfriend’s girlfriend) received a catastrophic medical diagnosis (cancer), so she and my girlfriend decided on short notice to get married. In Wales, where they live, naturally.

The extended polycule did an absolutely bang-up job of pulling the whole thing together on frightfully short notice. My Talespinner and I ended up in an AirBnB in Llanddarog with Eunice, her fiancé, and her girlfriend.

Wales is…um. Wales is very.

Getting there was a whole ordeal, filled with airline snafus and almost-missed connections and ticketing problems…more on that later, perhaps. Once we arrived in London, things took a turn for the weird.

So there we were, a bevy of Americans and Londoners in a rented minibus on the way to Wales. What can go wrong, you ask? Well, now, let me tell you.

Wales is a place where their understanding of “roads” is more or less hypothetical. In Wales, you’ll often find yourself on a one-lane dirt track with trees on both sides, and you’ll like it, because that’s all you get.

Driving in Wales is bonkers. Driving in Wales at night in the rain is utterly absurd, a bizarre mix of high comedy and desperate panic.

Once we arrived, though…

Once we arrived, Wales turned out to be cold, wet, cold, foggy, cold, and almost indescribably beautiful.

That photo up top? It’s the view out the wondow in the room I shared with my Talespinner in Paxton View Barn, a converted barn at Bryngwendraeth Farm.

That tiny tower waaaaay off in the distance in the left is Paxton Tower, a Victorian folly erected in honor of Lord Nelson, or so the story goes (I find it much more likely that the dude who bilt it didn’t much give a toss about Admiral Nelson and just liked the view).

Everything about Wales is breathtakingly gorgeous, even if it is brutally, bitterly cold. That’s the thing aqbout Europe, they just leave history and natural scenic beauty lying around on the side of the road, instead of packing it up and selling it the way we do here in the Colonies.

I mean, just look at this! Even the town streets are ridiculously scenic. Treacherous to drive, yes, but scenic.

After the wedding, we found a lovely old church.

Our last day, we’d planned to visit Paxton’s Tower, because, hey, you can’t visit a foreign country with a faux-castle nearby and not go.

A ferocious squall swept in on our last night, bringing rain and such fog as can scarcely be imagined by human intellect…

…but we made the trek anyway.

There’s remarkably little to see there—it is literally only a model—but from the foot of the tower, the landscape is breathtaking. You can see the Emyn Muil across the Dead Marshes almost to the great gates of Mordor themselves!