Saturday 12th August
Pembrokeshire here we come, but instead of doing in one stint we decided to leave a day earlier and stop the night in Brecon; I say a day earlier but I mean leaving in the afternoon. We had arranged for haircuts and a “tree stump-grinder” to come and give us a quote. We eventually hit the road around 1500hrs, a little over 2-hours drive. Our destination was a “municipal” car park over looking the river Usk that allows motorhomes free overnight accommodation between 1800hrs and 0800hrs
Out of our village and straight into very slow moving traffic on the A303 and when we turned to the link road heading to Taunton, the same. Being a Saturday afternoon we thought the majority of the holiday traffic would have gone; wrong!!! Never mind we’re on the M5 soon, that should be clear; wrong again, it was worse, stop – start, stop – start all the way until junction 18a, the turn-off to South Wales, at this point the road was clear; obviously no one wanted to holiday in Wales!!!
Arriving in Brecon 10-mins before the free time starts, we took a chance and parked. It was raining pretty hard so with no visible cameras and we figured no one from the “enforcement” company would be about, we took a calculated risk.
After dinner we decided to head into Brecon as on the way through we “clocked” lots of people wandering about, far more than one would expect normally, also we noticed a number of “pop-up” bars.
The walk into town turned out to be farther than we thought, but the “lure” of a decent pint of local ale kept me going. The rain couldn’t decide what to do, it rained one minute and then stopped as we wandered along a very picturesque footpath alongside the river bank. It turned out this weekend is the Brecon “Jazz Festival”; no doubt this accounts for the number of folk about.
We wandered, though I struggled around looking for somewhere to get my pint (or two!) but to no avail, all the pubs were heaving, but worse, the music was blaring so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think, not our cup-of-tea. So failing to get a drink we welded back to Rosie though by now the rain had decided, it was pouring!!!
Back and secure, albeit wet, in Rosie we got the gin bottle out, no pint but gin and cribbage before bed.