Wales Trip

This time around rather then posting a single image I have sat down to write a travelogue. There is more information for a new technique of photography called Geotagging at the end of the blog

We made a trip to wales on last weekend. Some of my musings of the same have been described below.

As always a long weekend was arriving and I my lazy self hadn't planned for any particular outing. Once my wife showed me her glaring eyes on Monday (28th April)that I swung into action ;). As it would have a trip to Scotland and Swiss was out of question as we hadn't booked earlier.

A little poking around revealed a beautiful country of Wales part of UK but not of england. I and chida ( my friend along with whom I was planning this journey) started looking for a place to stay, what was revealed to us was that Wales is waste if you go and stay in a hotel and are planning to go by Train.

So we went around searching for a car rental and the validity of my Indian License to drive in UK? As luck would have it the Indian license was valid for twelve month in UK.So we hired a Car Vauxhall Astra 1.6 and booked a cottage in Trefach, Blaenfoss, Pembrokeshire. The cottage was set in farmhouse of the main road and was typical english countryside that your have read in Enid Blyton novels. The only thing left was to buy a map and get started. A revelation hit us that time , this was not India and if you are lost you wont be able to ask a by-passer for the correct road as the roads would be secluded and empty. We went ahead and hired a GPS system.

Now we were all ready for a trip to wales.

Day1

We started at around 10 am on Saturday 3/05/08 . Had a few qualms about driving at first as there are so many rules in Uk not like India where you can drive as you like :(. This photo was clicked on M4 motorway on one of the recreation and service centre. The car was amazing with power steering, abs, power windows and tubeless tyres. I was able to manage 100 miles per hour at some time.







Our first stop was Carmarthen National botanical garden. An amazing and beautiful garden with large

variety of flowers and plants. the Image that you see is the one inside the park. There is Glass dome with tropical forest environment setup inside it. There are are many places with tulips growing variety of colors. To view the complete set click here.



Finally after driving for a whole day we reached our destination Trefach. This farmhouse housed our treasured
cottage. The 18th century cottage was tastefully renovated with 3 bedrooms, a huge hall and self catering kitchen. We couldn't have reached this place without out trusty GPS guiding us.The house itself was amazing to have spent a whole week reading the best novel and having wine or tea in the sun. To view the full set click here




Day 2

Woke a little late and then had a our breakfast, We had taken lot of ready eat, breads, Jams and butter along with some nice Chai. Had our breakfast and then left for the Poppit Sands Beach. The overcast day didn't dampen our spirit. Poppit sands was an amazing place the beach had Grey sand. It was windy on the beach but scenery felt amazing. spent around 2 hrs there and then came back to the cottage for nice lunch. Then we spent the whole enjoying the cottage and then going around the farm.To view full set of Poppit Sands click here



Day3

After relaxing on the day two , today was the day of action we covered lot of places today and as the day was warm and sunny has some great pictures shot.
We left early today for Abereiddy Lagoon. As it was early morning we were treated with morning mist as this lagoon.










We then drove to Whitesands beach. It had a amazing landscape with white sands facing a small cliff. We had our lunch here sitting on one of the cliff looking over the sea. The problem here is that u can easily miss the sunset or sunrise as in summers the sun sets at around 8 in night and rises at around 4 in morning.to view full set click here







We then moved on to St.Davids Cathedral which is a 1500 yr old cathedral. The cathedral provided a backdrop of some of the most amazing clicks.to view full set click here












On way we covered the Fish guard port and then back to home for a nice sleep.












Day 4

Our last day at wales, we went and covered the cilgerran castle and river teifi in the morning and then left for Reading.

The complete collection of wales trip can be viewed here









During this trip I used a new technique of photography getting very popular these days "GeoTagging". This technique generally involves tagging your photos with lattitude and longitude of the place so that they are visible on Maps like google earth and flickr maps. this way you can tell people where whic image was clicked. Some new cameras have have GPS . for me I used a simple technique is use picasa and google earth to tag my photos . Upon uploading these photos to flickr they are recognised automatically as geo tagged and placed on the flickr map. Just let picasa find your images. then slecting the image go to tools and select google earth . google earth opens with picasa image selected you can then just place the crosshair on the desired location. My flickr map is here

this was a long post . Awaiting eagerly for your comments.