For two days in August 2024, I had the pleasure of staying with a friend and her family on their farm in Wales. In addition to large family dinners and swimming in local lakes, I was utterly amazed at my friend's abundance – vines of ripe tomatoes, their small orchard of brightly colored apples, and the jars of fresh honey and cider they bottled daily.

The idea of building one’s home – living off the land and for the land – was foreign to me, someone who had only otherwise lived in several of the world’s largest metropolis’s (San Diego and Los Angeles). Though the expanses of the Western U.S. are famously beautiful and widely sought after, the overgrowth of greenery and unfettered wilderness of Snowdonia were uniquely memorable, bucolic, and transfixing. Thank you to Hannah and her family for hosting me.