Its the pits

Saturday

The British gathering is quite different from the Australian one, where most events take place in the hotel and most people are in the same place all the time.

Here there are usually several concurrent options to choose from.

There were walking tours of the bay, the castle, the sports and arts centre and the parliament building and Dr Who locations. In addition there were some coach trips.

 Today I chose the coach trip to the Big Pit about an hour away. It is one of the old coal mines and is still, technically a working mine. This means that you can't take anything down the shaft that may cause a fire or a spark. Apart from the obvious smoking gear, this also means nothing with a battery, so no cameras, phones or even watches,

We were kitted out with a hard hat, a lamp and emergency breathing gear and then proceeded in two groups to take the lift down 90 ftt into the mine. Our guide had been a long term miner himself and so was quite amusing and knowledgeable. We were taken through various tunnels seeing the equipment used in the mining operations which were mostly done by hand right through to the stables for the pit ponies. At one stage we all turned of our lamps just to see how absolutely pitch dark it was.


After this we were able to walk around the rest of the site which included a display and audio visual presentation on mining in general, showing the sorts of machines used on other locations.

Lunch of soup and roll was included and we headed back after that.

This got us to the hotel well in advance of the whisky tasting session. An Economics professor was the presenter and he talked about entrepreneurship in general and then the history of setting up the Welsh Whisky co of  which he was a founder. We then tasted 2 whiskies, gin and a bailey-like liquor.

The gala dinner followed with a Dr Who or dress to impress theme.  There were some quite good costumes.

The 3 course meal was pretty good although service was slow with so many of us. The dinner speaker talked on unexplained phenomena and had been a TV presenter on a show on the same theme.

Afterwards, they had a disco but many of us just drifted to the bar area for chat and drinks.