We spent the next day exploring the beaches in the area.\u00a0 Who knew that Wales was a land of beautiful beaches?\u00a0 Our first was\u00a0Horton Beach at Port Enyon, the most southerly point of Wales on the Gower peninsula.\u00a0We walked for miles on the sand, watched a group of school kids learning to surf and clambered around the ruins of an\u00a0early 16th century\u00a0house that reputedly served as a \u00a0front for a very lucrative smuggling career for a fellow by the name of John Lucas, a local privateer.\u00a0By the mid 16th century it had been converted to a Salthouse and became one of the most advanced of its kind in Wales, extracting the salt from the seawater by pumping it from the pools into heated pans where the water would evaporate and leave the salt behind.\u00a0 Salt was a valuable commodity at the time and this is the only surviving ruins of salt mining in Wales.<\/p>\n

$\"IMG_4050$ $\"IMG_4055\"$ $\"IMG_4059\"$ We ate a picnic lunch then drove to Worms Head, still on the Gower Peninsula.\u00a0 This was a magnificent spot with a beautiful beach that stretched for miles and a peninsula that,\u00a0at high tide, \u00a0looked like an island.\u00a0 Walks out to the rocky peninsula had to be timed perfectly to allow time to return before the tide came in.\u00a0 Even with signs at the trail head , people regularly get stranded and the volunteer coast guard is on alert for any danger.\u00a0 A pod of seals likes to hang out in the tidal pools.\u00a0 With binoculars we could see a few of them in the distance.<\/p>\n