Off the beaten track…

Sometimes we take THAT turning rather than sticking to the main road. It’s always a risk. The roads around out bit of Wales can get very narrow, passing points can be few and far between, and reversing a mile uphill on a twisting, stone-walled, single track road can reduce even the calmest of drivers to a sweating, swearing, heap of jelly.

It can get even hairier when you encounter a tractor and trailer driven by the farmer from hell who refuses to slow, insisting on edging up to within six inches of your bumper whilst blasting his tractor horn and flashing his headlights, hazard lights, fog lights AND indicators whilst revving his noisy, smelly, engine.

Fortunately we didn’t meet him yesterday or that woman in the 4x4 who seems incapable of reversing the six yards into the huge passing place immediately behind her, preferring to shake her head and raise her hands (palms upwards) with a shrug instead. You may know her. She’s the one with the piggy eyes which clearly announce that it is you who are going to have to reverse back along the road to the passing place you vaguely remember seeing ten minutes earlier. After all - what else can she do poor thing?

Answer – a) Get a smaller car. b) Learn to reverse. c) Take a day off from being a bitch. d) All of these.

I have met both of these individuals ‘off the beaten track’ as we euphemistically call the ridiculously winding, undulating, narrow lanes we sometimes decide to take. We once encountered a huge fallen tree on a five-foot wide downhill ski-slope of a track overlooking a twenty foot drop to rocks and rapids on one side and a solid cliff face on the other.

Despite speaking nicely to the tree it refused to move. So on that nightmarish occasion it took me over thirty minutes to reverse the half mile back to the turning point at the top of the hill with Gaynor walking along behind the car instructing me to ‘turn left a bit, turn right a bit, Careful, your back wheel is almost hanging over the edge of the drop. STOP YOU IDIOT, STOP!’

I was twenty years older, six shades of grey lighter and crying tears of relief by the time I reached the sanctuary of that turning point.

‘Never again!’ I always say. But then I see an intriguing little side road and ‘off the beaten track’ we go again.

You see, the thing is you never know what you are going to find off the beaten track. It isn’t all sadistic agricultural workers, sow faced florists, and uncommunicative trees.

By the way did I mention that the bitch in the 4x4 was a florist? She was, and her name was Sheila. Sheila of Sheila’s Flowers and there was a phone number. I called her afterwards from a phone box and pretended to order some flowers dictating a card which read: ‘To Sheila, hoping that you meet a tractor when out driving and reverse your car into a very deep ditch.’ She hung up.

Yesterday, we only met three cars on our eight mile journey ‘off the beaten track’ and on each occasion the other driver stopped and reversed to allow me to pass (nice, nice, chaps). The road was very narrow in places but we could usually see quite a way along it, so Gaynor spotted the massive tipper lorry bombing along towards us long before it was reached us, allowing me plenty of time to pull into a handy farmyard, hide from the lunatic driver, and wait for it to pass.

We ended up deep in woods in a sunlit glade by the river with rocks and waterfalls and swirling water. An old stone bridge hung above an even older ford beneath. It was one of those magical places that you sometimes happen upon.

The road continued the other side of the bridge, but it looked even narrower than the one we’d taken to get there and there was a sign saying ‘PRIVATE – NO FURTHER’. The ford looked pretty deep and the road up from it very steep and slippery so instead of going any further and continuing our adventure off the beaten track we just took a few photos and drove back to the safety and relief of the main road.

Phew! We’d got away with it again.