Tenby Day 12 & 13

August 25 and 26:  Yesterday was a quiet, windless day with some amount of rain in the afternoon.  We walked around town in the morning with no particular objective.  We watched waterfront activities in the harbor, including tour and fishing boats taking on customers and families fishing for small crabs.  The crabs were so little, we could not imagine how they were to be used.  We went into the local market and found a family butcher; we purchased 3 pork, apple and sage sausages for our last dinner.  We also found a local charity shop that will take our worn-out hiking boots and Betsy's bike helmet, so we don't have to carry them home.  Every town and village in England has a multiplicity of shops selling used goods to support different charities, from the Red Cross to cancer research to animal welfare.  This particular shop supports Air Wales, an air ambulance service.  

The view from the Harbor to North Beach

Our apartment building is the beige/white one

We came back to the flat and did a successful test packing for the last leg of our adventure - Greece.  We separated clothes into two piles, one that we will take to Greece and one that will stay behind in London.  The test was to see whether the Greece gear would fit into the  soft-sided bags we need for the sailboat.  We left things mostly packed in anticipation for the trip to London on Saturday.

We went out for dinner to a Greek restaurant, set into a part of the Tenby City Wall.  Betsy had mousaka and I had chicken guvena with rice and a Greek salad.  We timed dinner to finish in time to attend a charity concert by the Tenby Male Choir at the local parish church, St Mary's.  The men, all but one elderly, sang 3 sets of songs from a long song list that was handed out at the beginning. The songs ranged from pop tunes to religious pieces, as well as an number of songs in Welch.    They were accompanied by a pianist.

During the first interval, two young sisters (age 14 and 9) each played a couple of piano pieces.  They were quite good,  given that the planned guest artist for this concert was taken suddenly ill in the morning.  That artist, Hannah, who is the granddaughter of the owner of the apartment building we are staying in, has played violin with the choir for 10 years.  This means the two sisters had only a few hours notice before playing in front of an audience of a couple hundred.  During the second break, a single member of the choir sang 2 solos - a piece from Les Miserables and an Italian song entitled Sorrento.

The concert raised money for the local chapter of the Sea Cadets (a type of "scouting" for teenagers) and the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution).  We enjoyed it and were the only Americans in attendance; the MC asked early in the concert and promised us a song.  It is a tradition to end every concert with something called The American Trilogy, made famous by Elvis Presley.  It turns out to be a medley of Dixie, followed All My Trials (a Bahamian lullaby), and then The Battle Hymn of the Republic.  The concert ended with the British and Welch national anthems, sung by everyone present.

Today, we took our charity items to the shop and waved goodbye (Betsy's boots, in particular, had served her well).  We then caught a bus for Saundersfoot and walked a section of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path to just past the town of Amroth, the official start/finish for the path.  We passed several small villages nestled in cracks between the headlands, some nice beaches that were full of families (it being a fine day and the start of a 3- day Bank Holiday weekend), and three tunnels originally used by coal mine trains to move coal to the docks.  The path at this latter point is a rails-to-trail conversion and part of the off-road section of bikeway NCN #4.

Tunnel

The Path down to Amroth

We made it to end of the trail and returned to Saundersfoot.  We stopped at the pub in The Old Chemist Inn for ciders.  Betsy chose to walk the path back to Tenby, instead of repeating the inland route we followed last week.  We went up and down, but the elevation changes were not large, we knew what to expect, and the views were splendid today.  We could see east to the Gower peninsula and southeast possibly to Devon, and along the coast around Tenby.  We arrived back to the flat by 5:30 pm, covering 10.2 miles for the day.  A nice way to end our Welch retreat.

The Plaque marking the start/finish of the Coast path (we are at 4 o'clock on the map)

186 miles to the other end

Tenby from the North