Bruce & Lois

Wednesday 28/08/13

Beginning at 9:00am I (Bruce) met with the Interim Committee of the ICRC to do the final planning for the conference. We took longer than expected and only finished our work at 2:00pm. The prayer service was held in the host church, Immanuel Evangelical Presbyterian Church, led by several of the ministers from UK churches.

Tuesday 27/08/13

Hay-on-Wye was our village today. It really was a village only, but such an interesting one. It is full of secondhand book shops. An idea of one man to make it the booksellers capital of the world got support and it really became that for the the English-speaking world. A bit more to the story, but I won’t go into that here.

Leaving there, we allowed double time for wrong turns before dropping our rental car off at the airport before the ICRC conference began. And we needed all the time we allowed. Yes, one of these days I’ll write about the signs here...

Monday 26​/08/13

Back to Llandudno late Sunday evening, but it was on Monday that we began to realise what we had ‘gotten ourselves into’ as I mentioned above. It turned out it was a bank holiday, good weather too, and people had come out in droves for the weekend and more on Monday. Well, we were leaving and heading for Caernarfon Castle so that was okay; the cars coming into Llandudno non-stop were going the opposite way from us.

But we got down near the Castle and missed our turn (nothing new and different for us here), and suddenly there was a mile of traffic coming our direction and scarcely moving. Bruce almost decided not to turn around to go back for the castle as he thought we would be in that long a line of traffic. However, common sense prevailed as we eventually realised they couldn’t all be going to the castle! More people heading for the beaches, no doubt (now miles away) – perfect weather for that. We turned around and fairly quickly were able to get to our turn-off. The castle was busy but not exceptionally so. It was a very good choice of castles to visit as so much of it is well preserved and well explained.

And then we meandered through the town of Caernarfon itself before heading towards our evening stay. It is really nice to be going the opposite way of all the traffic; even the secondary roads were quite busy.

Saturday 24/08/13 and Sunday 25/08/13

Tatton Park visit: the wonderful mansion (see photos posted by Bruce) was well worth the tour. But no wonder the proletariat felt the wealthy were getting too much. For all that the spending of the wealthy supposedly helps an economy, they were very selfish and proud in their spending, not to mention oppressive. And most of the wealthy seemed to get themselves into deep debt and eventually had to sell the family inheritance: people always like to spend more than they have no matter how much they have. Has anything changed???

And then on to Knutsford, a childhood hometown of Elizabeth Gaskell. They had a special display this month of the various homes of Elizabeth G., and we also enjoyed the Millennium Tapestry, a huge project of embroidery depicting the whole town of Knutsford in 2000, 40 feet long with 6.3 million stitches.

Getting lost once again after taking a wrong exit, we made it to our booked B&B in Llandudno, a seaside town of about 20,000. We did not know what we had gotten ourselves into for the weekend! I had pictured another small seaside village. It is one of the big seaside resorts, but what a special one. It has quite a history, but most impressive are the dozens and dozens of hotels built on the seaside front with the ‘promenade’ between them and the sea – a planned Victorian resort. The hotels are virtually all alike, and what a row of white buildings that made. The photos don’t do it justice. On other streets the Victorian homes and hotels and B&B’s are mostly stone, and all of these are also quite a sight. I can’t stop asking Bruce to take photos of the stone buildings.

We also did the ‘chapel’ walk to see six of the Welsh chapels. These ‘chapels’ are really big stone churches of various denominations. The independent Welsh spirit really took to the nonconformist (dissenters) movement and endured quite a bit of persecution when they refused to sign an agreement of conformity, but once there was freedom the various denominations each developed their own identify and built a chapel.

Sunday we went to Bangor, about 20 minutes away, to the Ebenezer Evangelical Church (a church that subscribes to the Westminster Confession – bar the clause on infant baptism in order to allow baptists as members), where we appreciated the services and also the fellowship with the Finnies and another visiting young couple who are missionaries.