News snippets

Many thanks again to those of you who took an interest in my daughter Abi’s and my wife Ali’s sponsored 24 hour crossing of all 15 of Wales’ mountains over 3000 feet high. The money has arrived with the childrens charity in Kyrgyzstan, the Children of Tien Shan, and this is an email message we had from Irina Trofimov –

"My dear Ali, we are so happy to inform you that finally we received your money!!! Thank you so much I know that it took a little bit longer than all of us expected but it is here. You can not imagine how much this means to us. We have been praying for a long time to have enough money to finish our Crisis Center and furnish it. This Crisis Center will be used for children and teenagers in a variety of ways including the independent living program. We will keep you updated providing you with photos and reports.

Thank you again so much.

I reached the grand old age of 50 a couple of weeks ago. I have to confess that we treated ourselves to a week in Grenada to celebrate it. Things went slightly wrong at first – we had planned that our first full day in the Caribbean be my birthday, but we arrived at Gatwick Airport early the day before to be told that we would not be flying that day – so I spent much of my birthday on an aerial cattle truck! All the same, it was worth it. What a beautiful island Grenada is. In our 5 days there we got all the family scuba diving and did 2 dives, we found remote beaches to snorkel on, we had a wonderful muddy rainforest exploration on which a troupe of monkeys came to visit us, and we found our way to a waterfall in the rainforest where the kids jumped from 20 feet into the pool. We all feel that we must return to Grenada one day to more fully explore.

I must apologize to those of you with 2008 Wales Calendars. We have recently discovered that two dates are missing from it; 31st August and 30th November! It is not as bad as it sounds, because the boxes are there for the dates and the following dates all fall on the right days of the week – it just needs those two numbers writing in. There are no such errors in the 2008 Snowdonia Calendar. I am sorry that this somehow happened, and have made doubly sure that there are no such problems in the 2009 calendars.