Final holiday weekend

Another damp miserable day yesterday. I stayed home while the girls went out to Roath Park in the morning, then traipsed into the office to work on generating the first batch of 2014 invoices ready for issuing next week. Last year I did them in November before going to Sicily. It's not a difficult task. The difficulty, when I only get to do it once a year, is remembering how to produce a decent data-set from the RadioNet client database, then getting Word's mail-merge to make use of it.

I did most of the work in the office, but when I hit a snag, I decided it was better to go home and figure it out, as background office noise was too much of a distraction. Now that I've got my home and three office PCs linked to Microsoft Sky Drive, and, it seems to be working as intended, this was easy, and it meant I wasn't late for supper. When I return to Spain it'll make it that much easier to work on things, as if I was at the next desk in the office - provided the internet connection works.

Today Owain joined us and we went to Castell Coch. Annoyingly, it was closed for the month for restoration and cleaning work, but according to the CADW website it was open. We were able to park outside the gates - not even the car park was in use, and the narrow roadside was lined with the parked cars of walkers. Not a good idea. We let Jasmine explore the outside of the castle precinct. She found a discarded ivy wreath in the dry moat, seemed to know exactly where it was meant to be, and took it back where it belonged and hung it up on the door.

Then we walked up the hillside and played with her in the woods for an hour.

We then drove over to St Nicholas and visited the Tinkinswood and St Lythan's burial chambers. 

We had lunch in the excellent Duffryn House visitor centre restaurant in between the two visits. Fortunately, the rain stayed away long enough for Jasmine to make the most of the children's playground outside while we finished our meals, although the place she seemed to love playing the most was at Tinkinswood, and it was quite a challenge to persuade her to leave when we were all ready to go and eat.

We returned home for a final family meal together with Owain before Rachel and Jasmine leave for Arizona on Monday. Tomorrow we drive  them to her in-laws for a final night's stopover before the flight from Heathrow.