A Young Lady Visitor From America

August 31, 2014 John Roobol

At our 2014 family reunion at The Anchorage, our youngest son Matt brought along a charming young American lady called Caitlin. She was a lovely buoyant girl with a ready smile and we all liked her very much. She was born and raised in San Antonio in Texas. This is a very different place to Pembrokeshire having a hot and humid summer temperature in a semi-desert country. The city is built on a wide flat plain so that the buildings are well spaced out with huge highways running everywhere and open places inside the city. The attractions are the River Walk that meanders through the heart of the city. The flat sandy coast of the Bay of Florida is only an hour’s drive away. So Pembrokeshire was another world for Caitlin and she greatly enjoyed all the new things to see. Happily she is a good photographer and copied us her photographs. These provide an interesting view of Pembrokeshire as seen by an overseas visitor.

Her photos show her interest in the summer blackberries, the blue mussels, butterflies and ladybirds as well as the rugged shore cliff line of warm red rocks and deep caves. All these things are different to the sandy tropical shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico. The Welsh castles and fortified Norman churches are 1000 years older than America. The Neolithic burial monuments are something new. Our curious round topped mountains in the north were smoothed by the great Ice sheets of the Ice Age. The clean white wool of the Preseli summer sheep stands out as they graze on the green mountain slopes. She also took many photographs of our family during our summer rustications with the grandchildren on the sandy beaches of Pembrokeshire. Below is some of her work.