A Challenge to Myself: 101 Postcards from Wales

I’m incredibly lucky. I’ve been able to travel the world and meet people from many different countries over the years. Discovering and learning about new countries is one of the things I enjoy most in life.

What about my own country, though? I have great love for Wales, it’s always been my home, but there’s still so much I have yet to see of it. The latter fact hit home when I watched Visit Wales’ “Year of Legends” advertisement:

It’s amazing and beautiful and epic! Yet I’ve not been to many of the places featured.

I want to discover more of my country, but that’s an easy thing to say and then place to the back of my mind, especially when the opportunity for travelling elsewhere beckons. So, I’m publicly setting myself a challenge. 🙂

I’m challenging myself to send 101 postcards from Wales.

Each postcard will be from somewhere new. The hope is to not only discover more about my country, but to also connect and share with new people. It’s the perfect opportunity to do more blogging and photography, too.

If you’re interested in helping me with my challenge and would like to receive a postcard, sign up below:

This challenge will quite possibly take one or two years to complete and I, of course, don’t envision 101 people signing up straightaway. 🙂 I’ll blog each time I send a new postcard and am hopefully optimistic about sticking this through to the end. 🤞

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2017

“Why is everyone going on and on and on about 2016 as if it’s a person!?”

“Numbers have meaning, Siobhan,” my Mum replied.

I may have rolled my eyes, in the most daughterly fashion, as she repeated a story she’s often told me. Any year with a six or a nine is guaranteed to be bad, you see. 2009 was an awful year for our family for that very reason.

It was a few days before 2017.

2016 wasn’t a bad year for me on a personal level: I’m grateful that my family remained in good health; I made return trips to seven different countries; as an Olympic obsessive, I loved watching Team GB come second in both the Olympic and Paralympic games; I saw the Grand Canyon; I zip lined upside down over a rainforest in Whistler; I gazed at the super moon on a beach in Barcelona; I put down a deposit for my very first house; I visited New York for the very first time; I grew in some areas but felt stuck in others.

2016 was a terrible year for many: Toxic politics; terrorism; bloodbaths in war-torn countries; the list doesn’t end, every day seemed like a bad news day.

Numbers two, zero, one, and six can’t be blamed. But it can be recognised that, as always, my Mum was right and those numbers hold meaning to people. People needed 2017. The chance to start again is important.

I started this year off on the wrong foot: I’ve been in a rush; I haven’t been looking after my health (although that’s hard to do during mini egg session!); I haven’t been taking the time to count my blessings.

It’s not too late to start it again, though. 🙂 Whether you believe that the numbers in a year have power or not, I hope you have a wonderful 2017 and that you’re able to look back on the year with a list of wonderful experiences.

Be The Most Sublime Fool

The wisdom of Ray Bradbury:

If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.