Tuesday morning, we were slightly creaky from all the walking on Monday. After breakfast, Jill warned us that the weather forecast was clear for the next couple of days but called for clouding up and raining by later in the week. If we wanted to do any of the high mountain stuff, we should jump on it.
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Taking that advice to heart, but not feeling like a mountain climb, we drove to the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceType w:st="on">village</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Llanbaris</st1:PlaceName></st1:place> and took the train up to the summit of Mt Snowdon. It is the tallest mountain in <st1:country-region w:st="on">England</st1:country-region> or <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region> and gives its name to this whole region – Snowdonia. The ride up the mountain took an hour. The views were spectacular for most of the way, although the pleasure of the whole thing was substantially marred by the educational soundtrack they played. First, the content was cheesy beyond the dreams of Kraft. Second, it had been recorded by a fellow with an accent that sounded as though he was going to start telling us about his Lucky Charms at any moment.
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Fortunately, we got to the top and had half an hour to scramble up to the tip top of the mountain and enjoy the view. It wasn’t crystal clear, so I don’t think we were seeing anything more than 20 miles away, but I’m confident we were seeing that far. More people had walked up than were there from the train, and we wished we had too, although we’d have been pretty beat. We scrambled back down just in time to get our seats.
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No sound track on the way down, but the wind had shifted, so the coal smoke was more or less the whole air supply to the passenger car. Views were still great, and we faced the other way on the way down, so we had a different perspective. A lot of what I wrote previously about the layers of occupation came from what we saw along the track and even some of what the leprechaun told us – I couldn’t ignore it all.
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Some of you already know I had a surprise lined up for Sara. I had been teasing her with micro hints for the last few days. I always have to be very careful giving her hints because she’s so likely to work things out. The surprise was to take her to Portmeirion, which is a fanciful collection of architecture put together between the 1920’s and 1970’s by a wealthy gentleman who thought people ought to use buildings to make the landscape more interesting rather than less so. It really is just a pastiche of architectural styles, all of them highly decorative and in the end wonderfully put together.
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For me, the interesting thing was that this village was used as the setting for The Prisoner, a short lived 1960’s television series about a super spy who is sent away to a weird internment center in which a mysterious organization is trying to in some ill defined way break his spirit. Sara introduced me to the show, which is delightfully strange. I thought it would be a good surprise to bring Sara in here blindfolded, get her to a vista where it would be clear where she was, then let her look.
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In the end, it mostly worked. In point of fact, a bunch of work was done on the village after The Prisoner had been made and they’d shot creatively to make the space look different than it actually was, so I couldn’t find anyplace that looked exactly right. As a result, when Sara first looked – after the sort of involuntary trust exercise of walking a quarter of a mile or so on my arm with her eyes closed – she thought I’d just found her a bizarre space, something like a town we’d visited in the Czech Republic, I told her it did resemble that, but there was something else about this particular space. She looked around a little more then figured it out. She actually squealed, so I felt richly rewarded for having put it all together. We had a good time poking around the village and had a nice walk through the gardens. We finished with ice cream cones on a shady bench on a fanciful square.
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No Garmin Facts, I credit us 3 miles between the gardens at Portmerion and some walking around Betsy deciding where to have dinner.
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Wednesday we still had fine weather. After seeing all those people who had walked up Snowden we were eager to try a mountain of our own. Moel Siabod looked approachable at just over 800 meters – we’d climbed more than that on Monday. The Collins guide showed it as a difficulty of 3 on a scale of 5. We figured we could do it. The recommended trail head was also a very short drive away, and I was ready for another vacation from driving.
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We found the right parking spot reasonably quickly and started up the mountain. The early part was just a walk through fields – steep in places but with very easy footing. We climbed up to a couple of small lakes and the ruined buildings of a quarry working. Our guide told us the quarry hadn’t lasted long, as the slate dug there proved not to be very usable, but they got a fair number of buildings up, all easy to pick out. They also left an impressively big flooded hole.
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While we poked around some of the buildings, two other walkers – an English couple a bit older than ourselves – caught up to us. We kept exchanging leads with them for a while, sometimes comparing notes – they had a different guide to the walk. At the base of the final ascent, they decided to take a trail up the side of mountain while Sara and I decided to go more nearly straight up. We had a good time with nearly an hour of scrambling up rocks. It wasn’t much harder than climbing steep, irregular stairs, but we could never be sure it wasn’t about to get much worse. It was also very hard to estimate how far we had left to go. I fairly suddenly climbed over a last pile of rocks and saw the summit trig point only a few yards away. So far as I was concerned, we could easily have had another hundred feet of climbing.
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Because we’d spent a lot of time picking routes and resting, we walked onto the summit from our side at exactly the same time as the couple who had taken the long way around. We took pictures of each other on the top. The views were fabulous and much more satisfying since we’d dragged ourselves up.
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The way down was quite straightforward, although one trail our guide said we should use for a short cut back to where we had parked seemed not to exist. The other couple’s guide gave a different descent path that did show on my map. It was more pleasant anyway, as it took us through a nice stretch of woods. The way down was steep, but not otherwise too bad. We did suffer from a funny affect that from just below the summit, it looked as though the walk down would be very quick since everything below us was far away and therefore looked small. It was hard to force our perceptions to get the distance correct.
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We said goodbye to the other couple who were staying at a hotel we passed just before getting back to our car. Quick drive back to Betsy and a stop in the cyber café so Sara could do her mandatory Wednesday work. We took the rest of the afternoon and evening reading in the garden at the Old Courthouse and poking around the village.
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Garmin Facts: 8.7 miles in 3:46 with 1:42 resting. 2.3 mph moving average. 1.6 overall average – lots of view looking. Climbed 810 meters.
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