Climbing and Looking for Somewhere to Live

Our next big plan is pretty down to earth compared to living in the van, and climbing around in Europe for a year. This next plan still involves climbing, but is also a house hunting trip. Were not literally looking at houses yet, but we are looking at each area with a wider perspective. Hoping to find a place to settle down.

First up was the Lake District, which was vetoed due to the wet weather. Apart from that the Lake District is absolutely stunning and we will definitely be making another trip in the future if the weather allows.

The next location was The Gower. Somewhere we have climbed before, but it was a long time ago, and I didn’t remember much of it apart from Three Cliffs Bay.

First off was a long Bank Holiday drive up from Brighton. It’s fair to say that it took waaayyy longer than it should have, after an 8 hour drive we arrived.

That night we scoped out the next days parking for climbing and found a spot to park for the night. We started our climbing trip at Foxhole Cove, Parking at Southgate. The initial slabby grade 4 climb was my first lead in over a year. We moved on from this and bagged a few more in the cove in the 5’s. It was a slowish start, but we had a lunch break and a visit to the van as I had nails and my jeans were not agreeing with the sun!

The second crag we climbed at that day was White House Slab. This was a bit steeper and the climbing was thinner than my hairline. I planned s steady increase in grade but instead, suffered on one of the easiest climbs there. It’s fair to say after that I was done.

The next day we decided to head to Three Cliffs Bay, we had climbed here before and parked at the campsite. I remembered the walk down and enjoyed seeing this beautiful bay appear. The weather was not quite with us, but it was ok. We took our shoes off and walked barefooted in the sand to the foot of the easy climbs.

These were pretty easy, and I remember climbing them last time. In better health and fitness would like to climb some of the testier routes on the archway, but I will leave that for another day.

We took a walk over to the Pobbles East section that only had a short window either side of low water as we had not climbed there before. The first route was ridiculously easy for a VDiff, and the second route, a severe was not that hard either. Although next to this was a test piece for anyone who didn’t like to place gear!

We had lunch in the cave and moved on before the tide came in. Back at the three cliffs we did another route before heading to Pobbles for one last final route for the day. If you haven’t guessed already our plan is to have a taster of as many crags in as many areas as possible to give us a good idea of whether we could live here and have a good variety of climbs.

I really enjoyed these couple of days and the weather and scenery has been amazing! Trying to find places to wild camp in the van was pretty tough, there are not many free car parks like in North Wales for example. Fir us this is not ideal, but hopefully when we go again we might find somewhere else?

For now that will do, I will put a part two of this week up separately, as this is already pretty long!