JD Vance says Welsh castle was 'coolest thing I've ever seen'

"The coolest thing I've ever seen and it's not particularly close," Vance writes of his 2013 visit to the 13th Century castle - which is a UNESCO world heritage site - in an excerpt from his book published in The Sunday Times , external .

He and Usha Vance, who studied at Cambridge, were drawn to the site of King Charles' investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969, because he said it was a "a cool tourist stop". "Our house in Cincinnati was built about 150 years ago, and people call it historic," he writes.

"This castle, by contrast, was already hundreds of years old when English settlers first landed in the United States. "For nearly a millennium, young men had climbed the castle walls and watched the sun reflected on the surrounding water."

Before his trip to the castle, Vance said he had never experienced the feeling of being small in an "infinite" universe, he writes in Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.

"But here, on the banks of a river I'd never heard of, in a castle we selected as a cool tourist stop, I felt for the first time something similar: the scale of time, and how little of the life of the world we'd ever see."

On their trip, the pair went for an English breakfast in a local pub, before visiting another castle in Conwy. "We did what young people do on a vacation: we saw the sights, we slept in, and we ate and drank too much," he said. "Every day reinforced my feeling of being a hiccup in the vast scale of time."

"We started a practice that has continued through our marriage: to go to the places other tourists don't," he writes. "To get off the beaten path, not to photograph a landmark or to say we'd seen something, but to understand what living in a foreign place feels like."

Vance also writes about meeting utility workers in Wales, who "hilariously" were "dedicated conservatives who'd read some of the articles I'd written in National Review". "They were Englishmen living in the Welsh countryside who read American conservative periodicals. "The world is a strange place, I thought."

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