Manorbier, I'll Take Both

I haven't managed to get together much of a narrative about our Welsh travels, mostly because time keeps passing and there are other things to do and write about. But I do want to make sure I put some things out there. So here's a bit from early in our trip:

After a night in Tenby, with it's pastel Victorian row houses built into and on top of the old castle walls, we hiked with too-heavy packs to Manorbier. We paid a piddling sum to camp in a field with a bunch of families. The next day we decided to give our sore selves a break. We toured the castle and had a picnic in the courtyard.

We sat in the garden of the only pub in town and read books and drank cider while leaning on our packs in the shade. I took a walk out the main road to see where it led. I had the idea, seeing a sign that said "Tenby 5 miles," that we could catch a bus there and have the pizza that we had passed up the night before, and then maybe even catch a cab back to the cheap campsite. After such a hard hike the day before, and Jason, who loves pizza, having not gotten to sample it during our one evening in Tenby, I thought it would be a nice surprise suggestion for dinner. As I got back to the beer garden behind the pub, and began telling him about my plan, we heard the last bus of the day stop, open its doors, and head on its way. Oh well. (I had been under the mistaken impression that there was one more. Alas.) So we had dinner in the pub. Jason ordered chicken with stilton (he loves the bleu cheese, he does) and I ordered a leek and mushroom crumble. Only the crumble (leek and mushroom, it said) had corn in it, and I'm allergic to corn, so Jason had to switch meals with me and I ate the extremely delicious chicken with stilton. So he didn't get pizza or bleu cheese for dinner. I felt like a cad. Then we went back to the field and camped again. Pretty nice day.

The next morning, we decided that the best thing to do with heavy packs and lots of trail ahead of us would be to, um, to go back to Tenby. Cause it's cute, and they have pizza there. On the bus out of Manorbier, a boisterous woman who seemed to know everyone on the bus told us a sort of joke about the name of the town: "Man or beer, you're better off with the beer." Now we know how to say the name of the town. We'd been wondering.

In Tenby, the pizza was good. We did some laundry and stocked up on welsh cakes, cheese, bread and fruit. We had a nice relaxed walk around the promenade and watched some locals fishing off the pier after dark. Coming back to Tenby was the right decision.