CAERNARFON, Wales — The smiling couple striding toward our van didn’t know us. But that didn’t stop Dilys and Dafydd Jones. Their welcome was warm and genuine.
And before we had crossed the sidewalk and the Joneses’ meticulously tended front garden rioting with a mild September’s many-colored flowers, we were immersed in amiable conversation.
Strangers no longer.
One of the frustrations of travel is that you see a nation’s sights, but its people remain out of reach on the other side of a car, train or bus window. You meet locals in shops and markets, smile at them on the street and observe them across a restaurant, but seldom are you invited into their homes and given the opportunity to see how they live.
Programs offering home-hosted dinners in North and South Wales open those doors for travelers. For a fee about equal to the cost of a restaurant meal, visitors can arrange to dine in a home on traditional Welsh fare.
Hosts are carefully chosen for “their warm, friendly personalities and their passion for Wales,” says Donna Goodman, coordinator in Caernarfon.
Guests choose themselves.
“We were interested in meeting Welsh people and being in the tiny Welsh homes,” recalls Don Payne of Garland, Texas, who with his wife, Elsie, ate with the Joneses in July. Among options available as part of their Grand Circle Travel tour, the couple selected a home dinner.
“The evening was delightful,” the retired Air Force major general recalls. “Not only was the food good, but it was an interesting venture into Welsh culture, which I would not have gotten otherwise. It was interesting and educational and enjoyable.”
We now followed in the Paynes’ footsteps: my husband, Travis; Idwal Jones, our guide; and I.
“We’re just ordinary people,” Dilys tells me as I pad after her into her roomy kitchen, past the dining table set with cloud-white linen, gleaming crystal and her treasured Royal Albert china.
Now retired, she previously worked as a secretary at a hospital. He’s a retired truck and bookmobile driver, a town historian and an avid reader about aviation, especially World War II-era planes and pilots. For fun, they answer casting calls for movie extras. Even Gelert, their aged dog, gets parts.
Their home is half of a duplex in what once was “council housing,” government-subsidized rentals for families who couldn’t afford to buy property. Thirty years ago, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher decreed that longtime tenants could buy their units at a reasonable cost, and the Joneses did.
Their pride in ownership is obvious in the splendid front and rear gardens, the small but pristine rooms cleaned to within an inch of their lives, and the well-chosen and sturdy furnishings.
In this space about the size of a modest condo, they raised a son and two daughters and now welcome three grandchildren. Dilys had babysat her 12- and 4-year-old granddaughters all day before our visit and still had energy for us. Amazing.
Or, maybe not.
The Joneses are veteran hosts. Offering hospitality on Wednesdays and Fridays between March and October, they’ve welcomed more than 300 Americans to their table since 2006.
“I’ve really enjoyed every single one,” Dilys says. “We’ve had rocket scientists here, Vietnam pilots, teachers, psychologists, psychiatrist, an architect …” She stops and apologizes.
“You must excuse my English. We only speak Welsh unless we are with English speakers.”
I find her accent charming, her vocabulary broad, her ideas well expressed. No apology is needed.
She stirs a pot of potato and leek soup and sets out bowls. In the background, I hear the men deep in conversation about wartime aircraft. They pass around a bent and weathered piece of a Mosquito fighter plane that crashed in adjacent Snowdonia National Park.
Dilys serves small glasses of Irish cream liqueur. (Idwal’s driving; he sips water.) Our appetites sharpened, we’re then called to the table. Dilys places before us mint-colored soup with an ivory swirl of cream, and we begin a feast.
I help her clear the bowls. (It isn’t required, but it’s a grand way to have a chance to talk.) As the wide-ranging conversation rolls on in the dining room, Dilys in the kitchen gradually fills the dinner plates with generous slices of tender Welsh rib of beef, “dirty” (organic) carrots, red cabbage she has poached in pineapple juice, roasted potatoes, a pouf of Yorkshire pudding and mushy peas, which she pronounces “MOOSH-ie.”
Americans love the big green version of peas with their creamy sauce, she says. For the Welsh, this was the heart of many Sunday dinners, mixed with bits of “a cheap piece of shank” (pork).
The plates fill. And fill. Until the bounty threatens to spill over the roses-and-gold rim of each dish.
“I’ve got a regular routine, you see. This is how I do for my own family,” Dilys says. When she entertains, she adds, she saves a meal for the 87-year-old man up the road who has “nobody in the world” and very little money.
She sets a heaping plate drizzled with brown gravy before Travis, and he exclaims, “Holy moly!” Everyone laughs, understanding.
She serves herself last, and as we eat and sip red wine, talk roams from history to family to work to their label-making enterprise and beyond. All of it is peppered with Dafydd’s gentle jokes.
To our “mmmmm-ing” and “ahhhh-ing,” he declares, “It was me who taught her everything she knows about cooking.” Then, gesturing toward his face, he adds, “and I’ve got a nose like Pinocchio.”
Googan, a smoke-colored half-Persian with big eyes like new doubloons, soundlessly approaches Dafydd’s chair and looks up. The man’s big hand descends, and the cat wallows its head into Dafydd’s palm. Sated by the affection, Googan slips from the room.
The phone rings. It’s their son thanking Dilys for baby-sitting.
Out comes the couple’s album containing photos of each group they’ve entertained. They speak fondly of the folks behind the faces as each page is turned.
“They’re lovely people, every one,” Dilys says of the Americans. “It’s as if they’ve been cloned. They’re all lovely … so natural, and so gracious and thankful.”
She seems filled with wonder: “They thank me very much for coming into my humble home … and I’m sure they have massive big houses and loads and loads of money.”
Dilys sets goblets of trifle before us. “This is what we used to get on a Sunday with tea.”
The dessert is layers of custard, sponge cake and juicy strawberries and peaches. “With a drop of sherry, of course,” Dafydd says.
Coffee and sconelike Welsh cakes are the epilogue to the epic meal. I feel as full as Santa Claus after all of those cookies.
The men go up the narrow staircase to Dafydd’s office to see online photos from the space shuttle, and Dilys and I chat. She tells me about losing her mother when she and her sister were young, and being adopted by an aunt, poor but loving.
In time, the good woman came to visit the Joneses at Christmas — and stayed 35 years. Not to worry. “Dafydd loved the bones of her,” Dilys says fondly.
She has put a Rod Stewart jazz CD on the player, and the melodies are irresistible.
We laugh and begin to dance in the living room. Idwal descends and cuts in, gently whirling Dilys through a song.
The Joneses stand at the curb waving as we drive away, our thank-yous echoing in the twilight.
Dilys has given me a key ring decorated with the figure of a Welsh woman in traditional garb. She says it’s to remember her by.
I finger the gift. Forget these good-humored, good people? Not in this lifetime.
IF YOU GO:
BOOKING A MEAL: Donna Goodman coordinates home-hosted dinners year-round in Caernarfon and the Bangor area in North Wales. She can arrange lunch, dinner or afternoon tea. A three-course evening meal with wine, beer and coffee is about $50. Reserve at least a week ahead. Contact: 011-44-1286-677059; infoturnstone-tours.co.uk .
In an unrelated program, Marianne Barrett arranges dinners in the Cardiff area in the south and in County Conwy and the Colwyn Bay area in the north. She began offering meals through Home Dinners in Wales in 1988. She advises booking on the program’s Web site (www.homedinnersinwales.com ). Dinners cost about $70 per person. Meals are available year-round. Contact: 011-44-2920-226680.
RESOURCES:
Wales tourism: 1-800-462-2748; www.visitwales.com .
U.K. tourism: 1-800-462-2748; www.visitbritain.us .
Train travel, passes in the United Kingdom: 1-866-274-8724; http://britrail.com .
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