Five go on holiday...

...with lashings of lemonade and ice cream...

As promised, here is a round up of our half term high jinks.  We did have a lovely time, firstly in north Wales, where we've been every Whit for the last five years - never let it be said that we're not creatures of habit - and then at my dad's in Herefordshire, which is one of my absolute favourite parts of the country - it's just gawjussss.
And with a little drum roll, here is my first ever mosaic-in-a-blog-post moment.  I present you with...Wales...ta dah!!!

(I've just looked at this post in preview - I am very excited about my mosaic! - and it actually appears that you need a microscope to see the individual pics.  Hmmmm.  I'm going to leave it as it is for today and then fiddle with my margins at a later date, so you'll just have to press your noses to the screen for today, sorry).  The slightly blurry image middle left is of bubbling water in the amazing waterfall that you can see bottom left.  This is in a place called Cwm Nantcol and I highly recommend it for a bit of a yomp and a paddle; there's a campsite at the foot of the hill nearby and, as if that wasn't enough, there's a lovely pub down the road with a great play area for kids (happy days for all the family...)
And my second mosaic (I know, I know, I'm getting carried away now) is of the lovely beach at Harlech:

(Now I've noticed how the mosaic maker thing crops the photos, so they don't look quite as good as they do un-mosaiced; but there are so many of them that if I did them individually this post would be about half a mile long, so cropped it is).
It was just lovely - lots of rock pooling, paddling, eating sand (strictly for the under-twos) and dune jumping.  The only thing I'll say that's remotely negative about a sandy beach is...blooming heck, doesn't sand get everywhere?  We got out of the car after we'd been to the beach to find two little piles of sand either side of where each bottom had been on the seats - it had just emptied out of our pockets while we were sitting there.
(Mind you, neither Mr N nor I is the most enthusiastic of car cleaners, so piles of sand was really the tip of the iceberg in terms of general crud in the car.  It's now looking all nice and shiny on the drive after I made Mr N take it to be valeted - a once-in-a-while treat - I know how to live).
After we left Harlech we drove across Wales, in all its glory, to Herefordshire.  Beautiful as it was, this journey didn't take two and a half hours, as promised by Google Maps, but instead lasted four and a half, so the mood in the car wasn't entirely chipper when we finally arrived, but my dad's is so lovely and peaceful that we soon had our holiday heads on again.

And the good news is that after four days of near-continuous washing, I've nearly found the bottom of the laundry basket x