2 months later...

Well it's been two months since my last post, that's half to do with being very busy with getting settled down over here and half to do with watching season 1 of 'The Killing' whenever we get a spare moment on our evenings or weekends, which, I might add, is seriously addictive but very much like a Danish version of Twin Peaks without the comedy and the log lady (and after doing an internet search, we realised that no one else has noticed this).

I think when I last left you, I had just been to an awesome pub and had been laughed at by a Glaswegian man for saying the name of my new home town wrong (actually I didn't put that in my post because I was too embarrassed to put it in, I'm coming clean now).  Since that we've done quite a lot, there's been three separate visits by different friends and each time we've taken it as an opportunity to explore a little bit more of our new home land.

First up we had Michael's good friend from Doncaster, Dan and his lovely girlfriend Helen who we took for a very long walk down the canal, across the very high Pontcysyllte Aqueduct  (yes I did have to google that to get the spelling right) and then up a massive hill the wrong way to a 13th century castle called Dinas Bran which overlooks nearby Llangollen.  I had to hop over a barbed wire fence to get into the castle, and scraped my leg whilst doing so which led to a mild 'I've definitely got tetanus' panic in the days after and a visit to the local doctors surgery for the nurse to basically tell me to grow a pair and stop wasting her time.  By the way Llangollen is wonderful, if we could we live there but it's quite difficult to get to (no trains, buses are few and far between here too and no car) so we're staying in Ruabon for the time being.

Secondly my friends Ben and Becca travelled up from London in their new VW camper van, they had timed it just right as that was the weekend that England played Wales in the rugby so we decided to hop on a train over the border to lovely Chester and sat in a pub to watch the match for the afternoon/evening.  Things got a bit blurry after that, I can remember standing in a Jamaican themed restaurant at one point and the next memory is laying on the floor of a train as I thought the drivers cabin was a toilet (I needed to be sick) but after realising it wasnt a toilet to throw up in I then decided the next course of action should be to lay on the floor and moan.  I think we got told off by someone, I got clapped at by some lads on the train. I went to bed at 9pm.  I woke up feeling awesome after having 11 hours sleep, but now knowing that I just can't do rounds when it comes to drinking with other people in the pub.  I prefer to spend time over my drink.  And that's the way it is. 

Our last set of visitors visited this weekend past, in the form of Amy and Anthony.  We took them to a nearby disused slate mine/quarry where Michael has been working to restore a public footpath through the area.  The land is owned by an elderly lady who used to take people on trips down the mine when her husband was still alive, now he's not, she's shut the whole place up and can't really look after it herself.  When you walk into the quarry it's like walking into the set of Jurassic Park, it's so dense and over grown, plus there's a flock of Peacocks which the old lady keeps on the land - such a treat to see some in a forest!  It's also a treat to try and imitate them!  Michael, Amy and Anthony were brave enough to walk into the mine for a bit, I was way too scared (later that night we watched 'The Decent' which I have never seen before, I will never go near a mine again).

We've also had a bash in the garden, and started to turn over the soil and get rid of all the crap grass and weeds.  We were really getting somewhere, until it snowed...

 

 ...and snowed..

 

...and snowed...

 

...and snowed...

 

...and snowed...

AND SNOWED.

A LOT.

LIKE NOT A LITTLE BIT THEN WENT AWAY AFTER A FEW HOURS, IT WAS UP TO MY KNEES (nearly) AND DIDN'T GO AWAY PROPERLY FOR ABOUT TWO WEEKS!

Within this time I had a birthday, I can't remember there ever being a time when I had snow on my birthday!

We escaped the comedy capers that the snow had brought to our walking abilities by going to Manchester for my birthday.  I've never been to Manchester properly before, and we had a right blast!  Independent cinemas, the best meal I have ever eaten in a veggie restaurant called 'Greens' in Didsbury (run by celebrity chef Simon Ritter don't you know), white russians, record shopping, going to a Smiths photography exhibition by Kevin Cummings (!!!!!) and going to the Peoples History Museum for a well enjoyed historical education!

We also managed to pop back to my first motherland, Northallerton, to catch up with my family for Easter, especially my sister who is expecting her first child at the end of August.  Her bump was just beginning to show! Such a strange feeling seeing your older sister pregnant!  It honestly only feels like yesterday that we were running about in the house, annoying my mum and making mud pies together (some say that was actually only yesterday, I'm not saying anything.)  Next time I see her it will be bigger and I have promised to help her tie her shoelaces (I'm just going to buy her some Crocs.)

As I have more time on my hands, I've now started some kind of exercise routine.  'What's that?!' I hear you scream?  Yes, it's very grown up of me I must admit, but after sitting in the same chair for 8 hours a day now I work from home, and then not having a commute - you do feel a bit restless and lazy!  So I started to go running up the road and back, and unfortunately it didn't go very well.  First of all it was a bit of a dodgy road - very dark with people racing past in cars at 40mph (we've come to realise that this area is a bit of a racer boy hotspot), secondly I also got laughed at by some really mean 14 year old girls.  So these two things combined with the fact that the cold air was killing my lungs, I reached into my bag, pulled out my wallet, and bought a treadmill from Argos online.  HA HA! I hear you laugh.  But.  You would be suprised.  I'm very much in love with my new treadmill.  I can run solidly for half an hour on my treadmill, something which I found impossible outside as I was distracted by cars rushing past me and not being able to breath properly with the cold air in my lungs.  I don't get laughed at on my treadmill, only when Michael sees me slip up and nearly kill myself (which I have done a couple of times but he has yet to witness). I feel so much better now having half an hour every day were I can fight the stresses and the multitude of things whizzing around in my head, into submission by running in the same place in the front bedroom.  I've also managed to watch the following things whilst running: Insomnia (a thriller with Pacino and Robin Williams which I have already seen but I quite like as Robin is a bad guy in this one and he's very good at playing bad guys), the Beyonce documentary (only saw half an hour of it and couldn't hear it properly over the sound of my own running and panting - so really just watched Beyonce dancing, laughing, crying, flicking her hair, being pregnant and looking fierce all to the sound of my own feet heavily hitting the treadmill) and finally Enemy of the State (again another film I have seen before, but there's something about watching a Will Smith film - I can't help myself.  In this one, Will looked stressed, sad, sweaty, indignant, worried and threatened, all to the sound of my running).  I need to work on the film sound to running feet sound ratio.

And thats about it, I realise this is a massive post!  There's probably tonnes of other stuff I've missed out on, like Michael putting up a spice rack and a pan rack in one evening or buying a plastic greenhouse for the garden or getting to know our neighbours a bit more (them knowing us a lot more than we hoped) but I will save that all for another day.

Kate xxx

Rhos-Lemon-Tree-Frog

So our second week has passed us by, it's not been super eventful but there have been a few highlights.

The week started off with a visit from my boss to deliver my work computer and after a couple of hours I was good to go...well that's if the internet wanted to work properly, which it didn't.  In fact it stopped working altogether by Tuesday, so my work was on hold until Wednesday when I waited ALL MORNING for a BT technician only to turn up at half 12 (half an hour before the 8am-1pm time slot) and fix the problem within ten minutes.  Ahhh, finally I could start work, well that's if the connection was fast enough.  Thanks to BT's policy of capping how many Mbps you get for the first ten days of your new connection, I was unable to stretch my editing wings fully all week (since then the connection has now been uncapped but that's only thanks to another hundred or so call to BT to get it sorted.)  Good old phone line monopolising BT.

Tuesday was a great day, as on Tuesday we got our new-second-hand sofa delivered.  I never knew how much a sofa could impact on your personal happiness, and thanks to a lucky eBay purchase of £20 for the sofa AND delivery our smugness overflowed and mixed with the happiness to create one big mushy ball of cosy gunk.  In addition to the sofa, a couple of attractive throws I had also bought on eBay arrived though the post.  Needless to say as soon as work was over, I dived bum first into the cosy stew bubbling away in the living room and snuggled down with a book.  We had planned to make a visit to the Chester film society for their evening's screening of 'Essential Killing' however after calling the three telephone numbers required to book a ticket and not getting an answer, and the fact that Michael got home from work feeling one step away from the mighty sleep kingdom, we instead settled in for the night enjoying the new comfort of our living room.  The camping chairs have been thrown in a corner somewhere, sorry camping chairs - you're only lovely when faced with a wet field on a groggy hung over Saturday morning at a festival.  We'll appreciate you another time.

Drool

Michael's parents came to visit for a few days on Wednesday, so we decided to head out to a nearby pub for a meal.  This wasn't any pub, this was a palace.  In nearby Erbistock you hang a right off the main road down a windy country road for about a mile and a half.  At the end of this road you will find a pot of gold in the shape of The Boat Inn.  Situated right on the river Dee, The Boat had the most amazing food I have ever eaten in a country pub (corn on the cob?  For starters?  Yes please!)  I tasted a half pint of a pale ale called Cheshire Cat, which played a delightful tune on my t-buds.  Along with one of the best fish (whale) and chips with mushy peas I've ever had, the whole mix was a fantastic experience for my oral senses.  I didn't want to leave this place in a hurry.  After dinner, a couple of the locals in the next room let their dogs off the leash and we were met with a happy black lab called CJ and a smaller dog resembling a mop, who was called Boris, they gratefully snuffled up any food scraps around our feet.  We got to talking to the locals who firstly mistook my accent as Scottish (?), then after a short chat they began letting us in on some sweet local knowledge, (such as how to pronounce the nearby town of Rhosllanerchrugog's name by remembering to just say Rhos-Lemon-Tree-Frog) and beckoned us back to the pub at the weekend to share more drinks with them.  Driving back down the country lane after our meal, we realised the sky was incredibly clear and stopped off at the side of the road (with the car lights off) to marvel the stars in the un-light polluted sky.  I can honestly say I have never seen so many stars in the sky, and when Michael pointed out the milky way to me, I don't think I stopped beaming from ear to ear for the rest of the night.  Stunning, and along with the Woodpecker sighting the week before, this was one big tick on the list of reasons to move here.


Michael's parents visited us again on Saturday, and we decided to go to a nearby antique warehouse emporium.  It was the biggest place of it's kind I've been in and we easily stayed there for an hour.  After picking out a couple of bits and bobs for the house, we stumbled upon a reduced price side board which looked a bit battered but in need of a nice (cheap) home to live in - after two weeks of stepping over the record player and the box of our booze in the living room, we decided to buy the side board to house these items, including our ever growing record collection.  After speaking to the lady who owned the chest, we handed over our money and waited for her to deliver it that evening.  We waited, 7pm came and went, then 8pm.  By which time we began to feel like we'd been swizzed out of our money.  OK OK, just chill, she's probably caught up in traffic, right?  People took their time about things around here.  So 9pm came, I felt like I had been watching the window way more than the film we were in the middle of and by 10pm we started to panic.  After recounting our steps at the emporium about 10 times, and realising we had no way of even proving we had bought it (not even a receipt) we made a plan to call the place in the morning, but we still had that sinking feeling of being done over.  Our trust in people minimised to the size of a peanut.

We had planned to start work on the garden in the morning, but instead the weather turned against us, the rain hammered down and it hammered down hard all day.  After calling the Emporium, we learned that the lady did in fact work for them (mega phew!) and that they would ask her to get in touch.  Two hours went by without a peep, finally she rang just after lunch and mumbled some things about her being ill and spilling paint in the van but she would deliver it as soon as the paint was cleared up.  'That's fine', I forgivingly sang down the phone, 'cleaning up some spilled paint won't take long' I thought.  5pm rolled around, we'd stayed in the house all day waiting for the delivery and around about this point I think the cabin fever started to kick in so we called her up - only to find her phone was off:
"WE HAVE BEEN SWIZZED!!!" We cried, flinging our bored limbs in the air.  After a lot of phoning around, we eventually got word that she was on her way, and it wasn't until 7pm that it got delivered, without a hint of apology.  Well I rather that than have money stolen from me.

The side board is now proudly displayed in our front room, it's weird to enjoy owning furniture.  It's something I've never been bothered about before, but I guess because we're so far away from Leeds - these little comforts mean a lot.  It's a feeling much more involved than materialism, it's trying to make an unfamiliar corner of the world into something of your own.  The fact that we're trying to source second hand bits of furniture is all the more worthwhile, knowing that we're recycling and saving money is pretty important to us although I hope it doesn't become an addiction and I end up trawling antique emporiums for days, napping on 17th century futons and snacking on the crumbs I find in old kitchen pots, eventually being chased out of warehouses by rich middle aged women wearing Barbour jackets and polo necks, their stringed DNKY glasses swinging wildly about their buxom chests as they savagely shake their fists in the air.

New chest knobs (snigger)

More chest knobs (chuckle)

Wales Weekend No1.

This weekend was the first proper weekend in Wales for us, Friday also coincided with the glorious end to our one month of sobriety so we decided to celebrate both events with a twin visit to the local curry house and the local pub (remember, voted best pub by Camra in 2011...I know in my last post I said 2012 by accident, I think I will just now refer to it as 'the best pub in the world' or 'pub-wow').

Getting to the curry house proved more difficult than originally thought, if you own a car you can get to it easily via the dual carriageway that runs outside Ruabon, it's right next to the road.  However getting there by foot meant an in depth look at the area on Google maps in 'terrain' mode, where we found what looked like a dirt path connecting the nearest pedestrian way with the restaurant through some woods.  We eventually found this path, but instead of dirt, it was just a mud path with no helpful lighting and also went over a river and so was a little bit difficult to navigate in the dark (and if you're scared of rapid running natural water sources like me, the river was an added sense to heighten my nerves).  We found our way to the restaurant eventually, and sat down with a nice white wine (mine) and Michael enjoyed a beer - smashing our alcohol virginity one gulp at a time.  We enjoyed the meal, even though it took a while to get to us which meant we began feeling the effects of our drinks way too quickly (not drinking for a month makes you an instant lightweight) and we also had a delightful chat with one of the waiters who inspired us with his own life story of living in London then moving out to Wales in 1991 and never wanting to go back as Wales was such a nice and relaxing place to live, huzzah!

Traipsing back through the death track with a distended belly full of curry and wine, I started to feel very sleepy and it was only 9pm - Michael had to really push me to make the best pub in the world before closing time.  We got there, and, tentatively entered the establishment as nonchalantly as we could, wholeheartedly thinking we'd be sniffed out as 'foreigners' within seconds and banished for life from the pub and the whole of Wales in general.  I made Michael go first, so he could take the full blow of any first attack, I'd take up the rear thinking I could kick, bite and scream my way out of any second wave.  Instead we were meekly glanced at by the locals who seemed more bothered about buying a Chinese takeaway or who had ordered a taxi that was impatiently waiting outside for a lady called Steff, I don't know if Steff really existed or, if she did, if she even managed to make her chariot - there was a lot of talk about her being in the loo.  The mystery is yet to be solved. 

The pub owners brew their own ales under the name of McGivern, unfortunately the only McGivern ale on was a bitter and I'm not too keen on bitters so I went for a pale ale called Oracle, Michael had one of these and then later had the bitter which actually tasted amazing, it was called McGivern's Bitter, of course.  Come 10pm, I think Michael could sense that all the rich food and drink had gone to my head, I think he could tell this from the way I sleepily laid my head on his shoulder for 90% of our conversations, with my eyes either completely shut or very slowly blinking.  It was time to get this slightly drunk panda bear to bed.  And that I did, at 10:30pm.  That's how it goes here in Wales.  Happily, after months of noise problems with our Leeds neighbours, we finally got a proper Friday night of pure sleep!

Saturday rolled it's wonderful happy head over us and we decided to visit Chester, we'd both never been there before and let's just say, we were very impressed.  Well done Chester, well done indeed.  I had an amazing lunch of Yorkshire Pudding and roast vegetables with gravy, we picked up some bits and bobs for the house, Michael went off to buy a drill on some industrial estate on the outskirts of town and I waited in a lovely cafe (imagine a mix of wooden and Formica tables and all the teapots were old and delicate with flowery designs) drinking tea and eavesdropping on some Irish women who were marveling over the fact that in Newcastle you can get a Greggs 24/7. Returning home, we decided to watch Harold and Maude - a film I would recommend to cheer anyone up.  I especially loved the fact that CatStevens is the entire soundtrack

Tea cup and saucer with delicate flower patterns...drool.

Blue flowers with a gold trim...continue to drool.

Sluggish Sunday encroached as lazy as always, and we planned to go on the Ruabon heritage trail.  Throwing tea in a flask and some fruit cake carefully wrapped in foil, we set off from Ruabon Library, past the Alms Houses and up through Pleasant Mount church onto muddy fields and horse riding trails to marvel at King Offa's Dyke and a Welsh iron age hill fort.  The dyke, built by the English King Offa to keep the Welsh out was now occupied by several horses who looked at us quizzically as we marveled the slight incline under their hooves.  There wasn't much of the hill fort there, a helpful sign explained that most of the remains had been destroyed due to agricultural needs.  The most exciting part of the day was walking through the Rocky Woods to find that instead of it being inhabited by elderly Italian-American boxers, it was instead the home to a couple of Greater Spotted Woodpeckers!  I have never had the pleasure of seeing these wonderful birds in the wild before and so this was an amazing experience.  We stood and watched the two birds for about 15 minutes before they then decided to chase each other through the trees and at great speed through the air until they flew out of our sights.  I couldn't take any photos due to not having a zoom lens on me. 

Ruabon heritage trail signage

Horses on dykes - hope they foal Offa it!

 Further down the trail, we also encountered an incredibly friendly cat, who played with my hands and trotted along with us until he found his house on the path.  We only managed to finish half of the trail as the sun was going down, we'll go on the second half another day.

Dance kitten!

So that was our weekend, we've just had dinner consisting of baked sweet potatoes with some melted bonfire smoked cheddar that we picked up at Chester indoor market, it's one of the best cheeses my tongue has ever dabbled with.

We have a packed few days ahead of us, and I will update you later on in the week.

1st Days. Trials, tribulations and first contact.

So, there we were happy as larry in Leeds.  Having a whale of a time as we had done for the past 6-8 years of us being there.  When Michael comes along and throws a spanner in the works by bagging a job in North Wales!  After the shock and a lot of thinking we both decided to move there together, a long distance relationship would be horrible and it definitely wouldn't work for us.

So last Friday night we held a leaving do bash at the one and only Brudenell Social Club, it was a lovely gathering of close friends and along with a bit of comedy, some speeches and some poems the end of the night was spectacularly brought together with a massive snowball fight in the masses of snow that had fallen throughout the evening.

Needless to say, we were both slightly worried about the prospect of moving to the other side of the country with all our stuff in masses of snow, ah let's get some sleep and worry about that tomorrow shall we?  Shall we?  No, instead we'll have a terrible night's sleep thanks to the standard friday night party our neighbours decided to have...again.  Well there's one thing to happily leave behind in Leeds after all.

Come morning, Michael gallantly cycled to the van hire company through the ankle deep snow and retrieved our metal chariot without trouble.  Thanks to the help of Dave Jones, we packed, cleaned and managed to leave Leeds by 2pm, arriving in dark Ruabon by 4pm.  After setting my eyes on our new home for the first time (Michael had visited in weeks previous to choose a home for us so I wouldn't have to take any time off work) I was plesently suprised and we literally threw our belongings into the house just in time to take the van back to Chester, catch the next train back to Ruabon to crash with some beans on toast!

Since then, the past week has been filled with organising the house and having a bit of a relax in my week off, mainly reading and watching films.  Michael has started work and is loving it, I've been to Wrexham a couple of times to scope out the local area.  This weekend we'll go to Chester and have more of an explore!  The Welsh accent is lovely, I'm enjoying hearing it daily.  I miss my friends in Leeds a lot, but hopefully we'll keep in touch online and also through the post.  I can't wait to get a real sofa instead of sitting on camping chairs, I'm also looking forward to Friday 1st Feb as that means after a month of not drinking, we get to go and have an ale or two at our local pub, aka 'the best pub in the UK 2012'!