It's me on holiday! I like to be a bit menacing in the hope of keeping the kids in line, although as a general rule they just ignore me and do what they like. I blame Lisa.
Anyhoo, the main achievement of my last four years on the planet has been my successful raising of a dinosaur. Toby is fluent in more than a dozen distinct dialects not used since the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, can name a dinosaur for every letter of the alphabet, and is able to distinguish between a carcharodontosaurus and a pachycephalosaurus from a distance of half a mile. He's also the only member of this family that can pronounce them.
So what better place to take him than the Dan-Yr-Ogof National Showcaves Centre for Wales. It might not sound much like Jurassic Park, but what you don't know is that Dan-Yr-Ogof is Welsh for Dinosaur. I think. Either way, it enabled Toby to survey his kingdom like a young John Hammond...
And take the mickey out of a triceratops...
That's pretty much the only photo I have of Toby posing with a dinosaur. He was so busy studying them like a dedicated paleontologist on a field trip that he refused to waste his time by smiling for the camera. As a result, I have a lot of photos of the back of his head.
Amelie gave me no such problems...
And I was no shrinking violet either...
Let's face it, if you can't pretend to be licked by a torosaurus when you're on holiday, when can you?
Of course, dinosaurs are all very well, but if you're going to call yourself the National Showcaves Centre for Wales, you need to have a bit of underground action too. And it didn't disappoint...
The Dan-Yr-Ogof Cave and the Cathedral Cave were both excellent. If a little chilly. And wet. In the case of the Cathedral Cave, you basically have to walk through a waterfall in the dark. It was like The Great Flood of 2013 all over again. But it was all worth it, and the caves were a surprising hit with the kids. And not just on their heads from the low ceilings.
As an additional bonus, the lighting conditions really brought out the dust spots on my camera lens...
The intriguingly named Bone Cave was a bit of a disappointment, and involved the obligatory use of hard hats...
... mainly, I think, because there'd been some kind of mix-up between inches and centimetres when building the walkway up to the entrance, and they'd erected the ceiling at hobbit height. You basically have to limbo-dance your way up the hillside. Ironically, the one member of the family who would have been fine was Toby, and he decided he didn't want to go in. He must have been reading TripAdvisor, as he really didn't miss much. The other two caves were far superior.
Personally, my favourite part was the lost valley of dinosaurs, which was so lost, we almost didn't find it. It led down to a beautiful waterfall...
... and enabled us to play Where's Wally. Firstly with Lisa and Toby...
... and then with me...
We never did find Amelie.
At the gift shop, I told Toby he could have any three of the small plastic dinosaurs, so he chose three identical velociraptors on the grounds that "they hunt in packs, so I need three". They're already plotting the downfall of his stegosaurus.
Before leaving, Toby and Lisa proved their ability to blend into the background whilst hugging a brachiosaurus...
... and we made our way back to the car park, pausing briefly to chase a sheep...
Ten minutes later, Toby had fed it to the T-Rex.
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