CAT day.
I’ve been wanting to go to CAT for a couple of years now and this was the planned day out of the week. I’d negotiated a fairly good price including two free adult admissions over the phone with the educational officer but Michelle trumped that with the offer in the HEAS leaflet. The woman on the desk thought it was a misprint and it was *very* cheap at under half price with her still giving us the two free adults too!
I felt slightly bad given I do support what they are doing there but it did mean they probably got more money out of us generally as we bought lunch there and I was more generous with saying yes to things in the shop for Davies and Scarlett too.
We went up using the water powered cliff railway which was pretty cool and had an audio explanation of how it worked. Sadly it was another rainy day although it did dry up later on.
We started off with the video about CAT and walked round the house and gardens with all the eco-friendly additions. I have to say I felt quite good about how green our lifestyle is most of the time and how much D and S already knew about green issues.
My one criticism of the day was that it was too sign-heavy. Even I got bored of reading stuff and the children wouldn’t stand still and listen to me for too many signs at a time. Retrospectively we should have booked some of the talks or a guided tour and gained something from the obvious passion and knowledge of the people there. I would go again and either try and make it coincide with one of their event days or book a tour to get the most out of the visit. For that reason it was not quite as good as I’d been hoping but we still got loads out of it and enjoyed it.
I liked the recycling area, particularly the glass bottle bridge. A quick calculation reavealed there to be about 2800 wine bottles – about 10 years worth for me I reckon 😉
I also liked the ‘treadmill of happiness’, the musical instruments from recycled stuff and the various power types in the interactive area.
There was a vegetarian restaurant which Scarlett was disgusted to learn didn’t sell ham sandwiches 😆 but we ate well there nonetheless with me having a delicious organic Welsh cheese and cranberry sauce baguette, much needed caffiene and hot chocolates too for the children and I.
The kids enjoyed the playpark area too and after a visit to the shop we were all very worn out and ready to go. Scarlett was storing up all her money from gift shops during the week (having started with about £3 in hand from somewhere else Davies had been bought something but she’d decided to take the cash instead) so she just chose a slate writing board while Davies chose a slate writing board, a spork and some other piece of wooden toy tat. Scarlett wanted a firesteel but they were quite pricey in there and we do already have one so I said no to that.
We found a supermarket on the way home and bought burgers to cook for dinner. It was Barbara and Katy’s last night and we were lucky to have another dry evening to sit out round the campfire.
I think that was also the night that Ady took the slope at the wrong angle and got his car stuck in the sand. Properly stuck in the sand. We tried pushing it, we trying pulling it, I even suggested lifting it, he tried low revs, high revs and eventually we asked the Ray Mears-alike bloke who shared our sandpit but had previously been very private barely making eye contact with us if he could help us pull it out.
He did so, refused our offer of a beer and went back and hid in his corner of the sandpit again 😆 Much to our disappointment! We did later learn after much private speculation about who he was and what he was doing that he is a cutler (knife maker) supplying Ray Mears and Bear Grylls. He was staying at Shell Island for 4 weeks selling his knives direct to shops. They retail at £400 each but he offered to make Ady one for £180 – lovely but still rather out of our budget! I was disappointed not to talk to him about it as I wanted to know where he learnt such a trade and quite how he makes them but he returned to his shyness after that chat with Ady and Chloe so I guess we’ll never know!
