Tuesday 21st May 2002

Place: Matin's Haven, Milford Haven, Haverfordwest
Weather: heavy, heavy rain

So many mornings I've woken up to sunshine, but the usual rain doesn't take long to settle in, and it is always horizontal here. Sarah & Andy went surfing, at least it doesn't matter is it's wet for them.

Simon and I drove southwards through Broad Haven and Little Haven to Marloes and on to MArtin's Haven. We had a walk down to the jetty where we would be embarking on a 'Seabird Spectacular' boat trip round Skomer Island on Friday night, it the weather improves. It does not look hopeful. Without waterproof trousers, however, it is not much fun walking and getting wet so we returned to the car to rethink today's activities.

We drove through the lanes to Milford Haven and were surprised at how little there was there. We went to Tesco for dinner. We saw oil refineries; lots of tall, thin chimneys with flames flapping about on top in the wind and rain.

Onwards to HAverfordwest to look at the castle which sadly was just a shell housing a former prison (now the County Offices) and a former prisoners office (now the museum) and it was in the latter we discovered a gem that saved our afternoon. The museum only cost £1 to enter and consisted of 6 small rooms but was full of old photographs of the town and small & large artefacts, including tokens used instead of rare coins in the civil war, old cash registers, churners and so on. There was an interesting story about a cottage in Cuckoo Lane. In 1811, a man was hung for poisoning his two wives with arsenic who lived in the cottage. Excatly one hundred years later, in 1911, in the same cottage a man put a stick of dynamite under his wife's and child's bed and lit it. He blew his wife, child and cottage apart and he himself received fatal injuries because he didn't plan enough time to escape. I don't think he could've been the sharpest tool in the box.

The museum was excellent and afterwards we returned home for chilli con carne and two games of Harry Potter. Since the rain always stops for the night (to restart in the mornings) we went and played football in the failing light on the beach.