I make my 100th Kiva loan and we arrive in Wales

The 17th of the month is Kiva Repayments Day when the majority of loan

Irina 

repayments seem to flow into lender accounts all over the world and the Kiva website is a hive of activity! Yesterday I received more than expected, due to a Mali loan paying back in full two months early, so I had $75 credited to my account. This enabled me to lend to Nagjije: a dairy farmer in Kosovo; the Agua Viva Racana Group in Guatemala: one of whom owns her own restaurant; and to Irina who sells shoes in the Ukraine. Irina's is my 100th loan!

I have lent to entrepreneurs and businesswomen in 46 countries and

Nagjije 

love being a part of Kiva. Feeling that I am making a difference, even in such a small way, is important to me. If you have thought about joining Kiva, but are unsure what exactly it entails, you can try it out for free at the moment. New lenders are being offered a bonus loan, funded by Kiva's benefactors. You can see the whole process from choosing which loan to help fund, to seeing the repayments coming in down the line. The only difference is that the repayments will immediately bounce out of your account and back to Kiva! Interested? Click here to get your bonus loan.

Agua Viva Racana Group 

After a pretty lazy weekend that did allow me to catch up with my book

Bird sculpture at Crab Mill Farm 

reviews and post them all, we have been on the move again today. Bye bye Lancashire. Hello Wales! We are now at a nice Caravan Club CL called Crab Mill Farm which is actually a dairy farm and is on the outskirts of Broughton. £12 a night gets us the usual electric, water and waste facilities, plus we also have a toilet and shower block, picnic tables and a small kids play area. Fortunately there aren't any kids here at the moment! There's a couple of fun touches including the carved wooden bird sculpture pictured to the right and the fibreglass half-a-cow pictured below. I just caught a glimpse of the cow as we drove in and nearly slammed the brakes on because it does look pretty realistic when seen side-on and unexpectedly! We have a hardstanding pitch with our own water tap and electric post. Crab Mill is close to the main road so we don't have the fraught quarter-of-an-hour drive on single track lanes that characterised our arrivals and departures at Broadgate Farm. The compromise though is that we can constantly hear traffic noise from the A55.

Not a real cow! 

Being right on the border once again - even more so than with with Foulden Hagg and Berwick Upon Tweed - we are going to spend the next few days tripping in and out of Wales. We have already learned a few Welsh words from road signs we saw on the way to shop in Saltney this afternoon. 'Ffatri' is 'factory', 'trafig' is 'traffic' and 'araf' is 'slow'. I think I remember that 'gwyriad' is 'diversion', but I might not have that quite right. There is a large Airbus factory not far away.

The Saltney Go Outdoors store let us down by being out of stock of the

Calor gas bottle we wanted to refill. Their delivery is already three days late and they're not happy with Calor! Fortunately our large Spanish bottle isn't empty yet. We did get a few bits for Bailey - a new funnel tube for filling the aqua roll, a thick 25m cable for the electric hookup because we're fed up with the old one tangling and kinking itself, some more AquaKem, and a little bottle of waterproofing gunk for my boots. We checked out corner steady feet too because we've managed to lose one somewhere between Broadgate Farm and here. A set of four was a good price, but we only need a single one so will improvise with a bit of wood for now. The end-of-summer sale is on at Go Outdoors, both online and in store, so it was a dangerous time to visit! Don't forget to show your Caravanning And Camping Club card at checkout along with your Go Outdoors discount card - us CCC members get an extra 10% discount!