there's a feeling I get when I look to the west

A couple of photo galleries for you, one associated with the couple of trips we took to London in late January as described here.

The other documents our short break in Pembrokeshire a few weeks ago (for, among other things, my birthday). We stayed in a little chalet at the Pembrokeshire Heritage Park, which is here just near Stepaside, or, as the blurb on the website says, "set in the idylic Pleasant Valley". Pity about the spelling, but you get the general idea. While you can in theory hire chalets in the park, they're mainly geared to selling them to people - we got the use of ours because it's owned by our showbiz chum Clare and she kindly let us borrow it for a few days.

We've done quite a bit of holidaying in Pembrokeshire in recent years:

• over near Haverfordwest in July 2009
• a flying visit to a log cabin the Llanteglos Estate over near Pendine in May 2010
• over on the west coast at Aberbach, later in May 2010
• in much the same place with a 10-week-old Nia in June 2012
• to Bluestone in May 2014

In a shocking failure of internet maintenance, I seem to have neglected to blog any details about the log cabin/Pendine trip - all I can really recall about it is that we took a trip to the impressively huge Pendine Sands and the Museum Of Speed that's situated just behind it. Disappointingly, on the day we went JG Parry-Thomas' car Babs wasn't on display for some reason - this being the car that Parry-Thomas broke the land speed record in at Pendine in 1926 and was then killed in the following year. Equally disappointingly, the lurid and widely-circulated story about Parry-Thomas' death - that he was decapitated by a snapped external drive chain - seems to be now generally held to be untrue. What certainly is true is that Babs was buried in the dunes at Pendine after being wrecked and was then dug up in 1969 and restored. I also have a dim recollection of a slightly foetid pint of Bass in the Springwell Inn in Pendine village.

Anyway, back to the present day: things to see within easy reach (walking range with a 3rd-trimester pregnant person and a pretty energetic nearly-3-year-old, say) include:

• the remains of Stepaside Ironworks (also known as Kilgetty Ironworks) right on the doorstep in the Heritage Park car park;
• a walk down the path of an old railway to the beach at Wiseman's Bridge where there is also a pub, which we visited for a cheeky pint of Doom Bar;
• a walk further along the same old railway route, including passing through three exciting echoey tunnels of varying length, to Saundersfoot. Saundersfoot is basically a smaller and quieter version of Tenby, with a nice beach and a couple of pubs, including the Royal Oak where we went and had some fish and chips and another pint of Doom Bar. The food was perfectly nice, though it appears they have been up before the beak for some hygiene infringements in the past. We suffered no ill-effects, anyway. 
• Tenby Dinosaur Park! Like all nearly-3-year-olds Nia is nutty about dinosaurs, so we took her to see some a couple of miles west of Tenby, here. Not only are there a whole host of life-size plaster dinosaurs in their little woodland area (including Nia's favourite, the triceratops) there's an outdoor playground (bit wet the day we were there) and a big indoor "Dino Den" with lots of soft-play stuff and ballpits and the like. 

Photos can be found here. Meanwhile here's a soothing animated GIF of the tide coming in and going out again at Wiseman's Bridge.