Walk around Wales, Drive to London

Saturday, we decided to take another walk without the car.  We wavered for a long time between taking a walk that stopped at a few privately owned beauty spots and another forested hill walk.  In the end, we decided for the less hilly walk on the grounds that if you’re going to climb uphill and not get any vistas because you’re in the middle of a forest, something is wrong.  The weather also looked like it had a good chance of being bad, and on all the climbs we’d done, we’d kept saying to each other “Gee, this would be hard if it was wet.” 

At any rate, we had a very nice walk, the details of which I will not burden you with.  We still got a modest amount of up and down in, although it was all down and up – starting at a base altitude and descending into various picturesque bits of the river gorge then climbing back out to the long distance path. 

The only interesting story to tell is that at one of the waterfalls, we saw and were completely sucked in by a brilliant example of chaos in action.  There was a turbulent eddy below one of the waterfalls.  The water was just enough loaded with chemicals from having filtered through peat higher on the hills that it foamed a bit.  We could see the foam scudding around and forming what we decided was a scum hog.  We spent minutes watching it maneuver its way around the eddy, always coming close to getting pulled back out into the current and being destroyed on the rapids, but each time just managing to crawl back.  Of course, the mechanism actually worked the other way – it had formed because it was in a bit of turbulence space that kept it growing rather than dieing, but it was hard not to perceive it as struggling for existence. 

OK, we’re geeks.

After 7.5 miles or so, we stopped back at the inn to freshen up, then went out for cream tea at a quiet riverside place.  We had earlier considered doing a tiny bit of nearby car touring, but the three day weekend was here in force.  At the end of our walk, it took us several minutes to find a gap in which to cross the road.  When the gap came, it was only because traffic in both directions was frozen.  I was very glad not to be in that scudding eddy of cars.  Chaos patterns are only easy to enjoy from the outside.

Over tea, we talked about things we looked forward to once we met up at home again as a way to keep from regretting so much that this would be our last day in Wales.  After tea, we poked around the shops a little then went back to our room to make plans for the road march to London on the morrow.  We decided we wanted to get onto the road fairly early and stop off at different National Trust properties we happened to be close to during their opening hours.  It was actually fun to examine the possibilities.  A few of the properties that looked most interesting were close to us, but didn’t open till noon.  We could only possibly see them if traffic was awful, so it was good to see that awful traffic would pay a dividend.

Seeing the crowds, we had booked a table for dinner.  We didn’t think of this early enough, so 7 PM was the latest time open.  We wound up having an OK meal next to a loud, boisterous family, the children of which managed to reduce their table to a horrible mess.  We debated asking for a different table, but the whole place was nearly full and the few openings we saw were near other families of unknown quality as neighbors, so we just chalked it up to experience.  We hung out in the garden at the inn, writing and reading, until the bugs chased us in.  When we got back to the inn, we were delighted to see that Mark and Jill had taken themselves out for a walk. 

Sunday did wind up being pretty much a road march.  Traffic was never too bad, but it was a long way to London.  We visited two properties Packwood House and Baddersly Clinton.  The gardens at Packwood had some of the most exotic plants we saw the whole trip, and Sara got good photos.  The Baron who had restored Packwood then sold it to the trust clearly made an effort to communicate the good he had done the kingdom.  The motto on his arms was even Latin for “Not for us, but for all!”  We learned from one of the stewards he’d been a pilot in WW1 and in general tried to do great things for England.  The surviving staff who had been interviewed described him as a caring employer.  Even the way the house had been laid out suggested he had a caretaker view rather than an owner view to the whole place.  I will ask you to remember this fellow when I write later about the Duke of Norfolk’s place here in Arundel. 

B Clinton, we didn’t get to see as much of.  It was very crowded, and they were doing timed tickets for admission to the house.  We couldn’t get in until 4 PM, so we decided toskip that.  We walked around the grounds, and Sara scored us some nice ice cream bars.  The house was fun to see even from the outside.  It looked entirely like a house rather than a castle except for being in the middle of a moat. I never got the story of what the moat was doing for them.

We raced on towards London.  I’m not even sure what the speed limit is on otherwise unmarked motorways, but I’m pretty sure I pressed it.  We were cherishing a hope of getting to Osterly Park very near Heathrow in time to tour the house there.  We didn’t make it, but it wasn’t for want of pressure on the accelerator.  We did get to see the grounds which were lovely and the exterior of the house which was boring just like a good Georgian building should be.  It did have a fun neo classical porch with carvings on its ceiling and pediment, but otherwise it was red brick, heavily planar, and symmetrical.  Dull, dull, dull. 

We bought Chinese food to go from a restaurant nearby and walked around the residential streets while we waited for the food.  We also stopped in to a little grocers and took an unbelievable amount of time deciding what we wanted to buy to drink.  English soft drinks are just too odd to make easy decisions about.  Sara was inclined to dodge alcohol as part of her jet lag management, and I figured I might as well for variety.  We wound up buying a big bottle of ginger beer and an apple juice mixed with other fruit juice concoction. 

We stayed Sunday night in the airport Hilton which was just as convenient and sterile as we expected it to be.  The black out curtains worked so well, we both slept past 8 am for the first time.

Breakfast at the hotel, then I walked Sara through the giant habitrail that connected the hotel to terminal 4.  We had to take the Heathrow Express train to terminal 3 to get Sara lined up for checkin.  We kissed goodbye with many regrets for another dozen days apart.  I walked back to the hotel, and if it had been one one hundredth as easy to leave her as it was to write this sentence we would have a very different sort of relationship. 

With that, I think I’ll wrap up, and try to get all caught up tomorrow evening.

Better late than . . . early

At the risk of becoming repetitive, Friday again looked like it could easily rain all day.  Our hiking guide recommended that when it rains in the hills, it is sometimes fine on Anglesey – a large island separated from the rest of North Wales by a narrow strait.  In fact, the tide is so extreme around here that at low tide it is possible to walk across, but there are several bridges now so we didn’t have to.

Jill dismissed as wishful thinking the fine weather on Anglesey theory, but still said it would be a good thing to do.  She recommended we go to South Stacks on the far west coast of the island.  It’s got lots of cliffs where some otherwise African and some otherwise polar birds breed in the warm months.  Neither Sara nor I is a big birder, but it’s always interesting to see how other fractions of the fringe lives, so we gave it a go. 

They’ve built a marvelous road across the island, so it was an easy drive and I got to appreciate some of the scenery even behind the wheel.  Military historians reading this will be interested to learn that Anglesey was where the Welsh always hung out and grew food while enemy armies were trying to bash their way across North Wales, confounded by the terrain, the weather, and the marksmanship of Welsh archers.  It really wasn’t until ships got big enough to deliver armies to the coast that there was any hope of taking Wales.  We could certainly feel the difference between the twisty little roads that are all you can get away with through the mountains and the American style road we raced across on.

South Stacks itself is a tiny little outcrop with a lighthouse on it, but the cliffs around it are full of birds.  We spent a little time in a viewing tower run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, but we clearly weren’t serious enough to stay there for long.  We walked a little under a mile along the cliff face back towards where we parked.  It was a wild, windy morning with rain just spitting enough to keep our hoods up.  Of course, this was the one day we didn’t bring binoculars along, but we saw a scattering of birds flying around and fishing.  Even more impressive to me was the wide variety of wildflowers all in various stages of blooming and seeding around us.  We moved at an absolute crawl just because there was so much to see. 

The weather started to clear just as we got back to the car, but we decided to drive on any way.  Our next stop was in Beaumaris, on the coast near the mainland.  We bypassed our opportunity to visit the butterfly palace just as we had skipped the butterfly jungle in Conwy.  In Beaumaris, we walked around the outside of the castle, which looked remarkably like the castle at Conwy, so we skipped goin in.  We did go into and spend a lot of time in the courthouse, since Jill had told us the original building there was a lot like the original of the inn we were staying in.  It was easy to see the resemblance, although each had been modified so many times over the centuries that they differed as well.  The courthouse was largely a museum to the arbitrariness of English justice to the Welsh, though with fair recognition that upper class English of the past treated lower class English just as badly as they treated the Welsh. 

We had a very nice lunch at the Old Bulls Head in town.  Sara had looked in a volume of fine dining in Wales and this was literally one of two entries for all of North Wales.  It was very good – could have stayed open even in a foody US town. 

After lunch, we had an invigorating drive across a small suspension bridge and through the town of Bangor.  For whatever reason, the traffic was awful and the signage was practically random.  Sara kept us almost perfectly on course though.  She’s always gotten light duty as a navigator before, since reading in the car makes her woozy, but she’s discovered that ginger helps.  She’s been munching candied ginger she bought in London and doing a great job with the maps.  She got us to Penryth castle in short order. 

Penryth is a purely synthetic castle, built entirely in the 1820s and beyond, but it is a beautiful collection of craftsmanship and it’s just immense.  There were rooms where it looked as though the noble having it run up couldn’t decide which of three types of arch to use, so he just told the builder to nest one of each.  Wood carving, stone carving, inlay work – it really had it all.  There were fabulous grotesques in one of the stair cases – dozens of heads no two alike and all interesting. 

The only blot on the visit, and it was minor, was that we had arrived close to closing, and the stewards kept telling us we should rush or we would miss the Victorian kitchens.  We did somewhat slight the room where they had all the most woohoo paintings hanging, and as Sara said, the Victorian kitchens were nice, but if she’d missed them to spend a few extra minutes with the Rembrandts, she would have been fine with the exchange.

Sara struck up a good conversation with an artist who was running the sales desk at an art exhibition upstairs in the stables.  (Yeah, I know, when I tell you that the other end of the stables had been used to display a half a dozen steam engines the National Trust didn’t know what else to do with, I will finally have given you a sense of the scale of the place.)  He trapped her into saying that one particular painting was essentially the only one in the show she thought had significant merit, then telling her that he had two canvases in the show.  As often happens when Sara opens by dropping a bomb on someone, he became extremely friendly.  He walked away with one of her cards, and I won’t be at all surprised if we hear from him if he’s ever close to DC.  I actually liked his stuff better than I like most modern art, but that’s kind of faint praise.  I was impressed that he painted things that were identifiably mountains but in color schemes that made them look very kinetic without ceasing to look like mountains.  It was the visual version of Pancake Hill (which my mother, the career English teacher, has since written to remind me is an oxymoron for any of you who may have been wondering).

We walked our artist friend and his banjo out to the car park.  By now, the weather was absolutely spectacular – blue sky, right on the warm/cool boundary, light breeze.  We decided we had to have some more outdoor time.  Our hiking guide had a short, easy rated walk that could be right on our way home, so we decided to stop and take it.  It kicked off just south of a village the name of which we never figured out how to say, so I’ll just leave it out here.  It turned out to be a very fine few hours of walking. 

We started out walking along a smooth track very slightly uphill through a bit of forest that is being systematically logged.  We checked in at an “Interpretive Center” that was clearly part of the logging company’s quid pro quo for the rights to cut.  They also maintained the paths we used and published a nice path guide we picked up to augment the little map in our walk guide.  The route took us past a superb group of mid sized waterfalls.  It then climbed up the western edge of the valley, high enough that we got great views back to all the waterfalls and got a sense of the shape of the whole place.  It slowly kept climbing until we could see a big stretch of Anglesey and all the way along the North coast back to Great Orme at Llandudno.  It was impossible to get lost on the second half of the walk, because we could see almost the entire route down on the ground looking just like our map.  It wrapped up with a descent that could easily have been a ski jump ramp and a short walk back to the car.

This is where I figured out that the outdoors doesn’t close at 5 or 6 pm, so since then, I’ve been shifting some of my walking later in the day to take advantage of touristy things and businesses that close early.

We had an easy drive back to Betsy, but we saw a lot of people driving the direction of the road that led deeper into North Wales from the rest of the world.  This was our first hint that the UK was headed into a three day weekend that, like the US Memorial Day, also essentially opens the summer touring season.

We got back to Betsy too late for supper in any of the restaurants, but also feeling like we didn’t need it after our nice lunch.  The only noteworthy thing the rest of the evening was that we had a great conversation with Jill – reporting on what we’d gotten up to and getting walking advice from her for Saturday.  We got the longer version of the story of how she and Mark came to be running the old courthouse, most of which probably falls into the “you had to be there” category, but we enjoyed it. 

Just put Sara on the plane

Just a brief note.  I need to check out of the airport Hilton soon and get on to my next destination.  I've referred a question to AOL Help about the weird tags that are displaying in some of my most recent entries.  I hope to get it fixed.

I'm a little behind on journal writing because Sara and I managed to fill up our days.  I figure I'll catch up in the next few.

Gardens and towns to the sea

Thursday opened fairly grey and wet.  We dawdled over breakfast to see what it would develop into.  It started to clear up, but still looked very threatening.  We decided to do a little car touring again, planning to stop places where we could get out and walk if the weather collaborated.

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First stop was <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Bodnant</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Garden</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>, an estate run by the national trust.  The gardens were just wonderful.  Almost everyone we had spoken with had identified it as a must see, particularly given the season.  The vast majority of the plants were in some kind of bloom. 

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The feature of the place is the laburnum arch – more than 100 feet of arched trellis with laburnum trained over it.  I had been seeing laburnum all over the place, but didn’t know its name till then.  It’s a fairly ordinary looking tree except that when it blooms it comes out in bunches of vibrant yellow flowers that look something like bunches of grapes but also seem like little fountains of water.  I had heard the expression dripping with blossom before, but these really showed me what it meant.  So at Bodnant, we walked under this long archway with these drippy yellow blossoms hanging from the ceiling and filtering the light.  They also gave off a very pleasant scent, although it did remind me of the scent of lemon towels a certain stratum of oriental restaurant trots out to the diners after a meal.

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The formal gardens around the house are in five tiers of terraces, then you get down into a whole valley floor planted with a mix of the same kinds of plants we’d been seeing in the forests and a range of exotics, all carefully placed and mixed.  There are also a few historical buildings, some of which had always been on the site and some of which were brought there.  All in all a stunning place to wander around, and so over the top, there was no danger of getting ideas we would think we had to replicate in our tiny garden at home.

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The place was alive with senior citizens and families.  We only saw two other apparently childless but child feasible aged couples in the place.

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Next destination was the walled town of <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Conwy</st1:place></st1:City>.  It must have become unimportant and economically distressed for some chunk of its history, because it still has nearly all of its walls.  (If it had been more important, it would have grown over them and hence destroyed them.  If it had ever had gobs of money, it would have pulled them down to recycle the stones into new, grand buildings.)  You can still do the wall walk around more than 2/3rds of the town as we did, which is an enjoyable though sometimes vertiginous way to see it. 

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We also toured the castle – in a state of repair that makes it particularly easy to see how the castle was meant to work as a fortification.  It was very much like crawling around a life sized cutaway model.  The part of it that will stay with me forever, though, wasthat they had the most ridiculous set of precautionary warnings of various dangers while touring the castle with accompanying graphics.  The one for “Some spaces are dark, be sure to allow your eyes to adjust before proceeding” looked like “This castle may give some visitors a severe migraine.” 

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We also toured the oldest house in town which was cute.  The introductory video said the house had a near brush with being bought and carried off to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>, but when we asked the people at the house which American had tried to buy it, we got very silly answers given in a way that made it clear they didn’t know and were making them up. 

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Third stop was Llandudno which we never heard said twice in the same way, so I have no idea how it should really be pronounced.  It is a mid sized seaside resort.  I have a bad habit when car touring of pulling into the first likely looking parking spot then charging out to see where I am after.  I just hate driving and especially driving through winding little town streets that much.  This is a habit that has gotten me (and my traveling companions) a lot of healthy exercise and a certain amount of “What the other tourists don’t see (because it’s just a long street of dull apartment blocks)” over the years.  This was no exception.

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We were driving along and passed a now entering sort of sign for Llandudno.  I saw the ocean on the left and a blue square with a white P on it.  Within moments, we were parked on a side street one block in from the seashore.  I figured we’d arrived.  We walked along the promenade, but it all seemed pretty squidgy.  When we found a map board, it turned out we’d found what was essentially the back alley <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceType w:st="on">beach</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Llandudno</st1:PlaceName></st1:place>.  The main beach was the other side of the peninsula.

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It’s not a very thick peninsula, and Sara didn’t want to put up with me whining about driving some more and having to figure out where else to park, so we walked the main street through residential Llandudno.  I was interested to see this town.  I’d heard for years how dull and cheerless British seaside resorts were, and I was eager to see whether it was true.  I am glad to say Llandudno delivered.  When we found the actual promenade, it was much larger than the version we’d found at first, but no more interesting.  They call it a beach, but it’s nearly all stones.  The block facing the beach is an almost solid overcast of 19th century hotel frontages – picture a long curve of white wall with black framed windows relieved only by the occasional extravagant cast iron entry way.  Some of the hotels are different shades of white. 

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The street one block further in land is solid shopping – almost all chains.  Some of the architecture is glorious old Victorian excess, but nothing in any of those buildings was open.  This brings us to one of my real frustrations as a visitor in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  It stays full daylight till well past 9 PM, buteverything closes up at 5 or 6 at the latest.  As nearly as we can tell, the only thing anyone does in the evenings is go to dinner, then lock themselves in their rooms till breakfast.  Llandudno does offer a few thrill ride attractions, most of them various ways to get up to the top of Great Orme head which borders one end of the beach.  There’s also reportedly a prehistoric copper mine up there, but all these attractions and the transport to them were long closed by the time we got to town.  I’m not saying I wanted to ride a cable car up to the top of a hill overlooking a boring seaside resort, but I don’t understand why I didn’t have the option.

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We had a nice Indian dinner, then walked back to our car to drive back to Betsy and lock ourselves into our room until breakfast.

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Again, no measured walking, but between the gardens, the walls of Conwy, and my unique approach to parking in strange towns, I’m sure we put more than 6 miles behind us.

Mountain climbing on the easy and hard plans

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.

Lakes above Betws-y-coed

Monday morning, we stoked up with a good breakfast at the Courthouse.  The dining room is actually the old court room.  One of my walking guides recommended a route that would visit a few of the mountain lakes near Betsy and let us completely ignore the car for the day.  After all the driving the day before, this sounded pretty good.  Looking at my map, most of the route seemed to make sense.  We touched base with Jill on the way out.  She was dubious of our ability to finish the route and gave us some advice about bail out opportunities and a card for the local taxi service.  Having already walked further than I wanted to walk back from, I appreciated the card.  She also warned us that we would find the paths unevenly marked.

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Removing any suspense, we did walk the whole way around as planned and didn’t need to catch a cab.  We’re in the middle of a national park right now and are essentially here the week before the beginning of the crowded season.  As a result, most of the facilities have woken up, but we have vast stretches of the park practically to ourselves.  Our route started out near an almost empty parking lot just on the edge of the village.  It climbed through forest with occasional evidence of mining. 

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There are basically three layers of human occupation here.  It started out as agricultural territory with some plowed crops and lots of sheep and cows.  The higher country we’ve seen often has ruined farm buildings and field walls left over from this layer.  After that, a lot of the country was given over to mining and quarrying – lead, copper, iron, and slate mostly.  The abandoned mines and mine buildings we passed on Monday came from that, and the mining period left a lot of the hilltops in bad shape.  Just in the last handful of decades, a lot of the mine torn land has been reforested for the most recent primary industry – tourism.  <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on">North Wales</st1:place> has been a vacation destination well back into the 19th century, overlapping with the end of mining.  Reforesting the most ripped up areas has helped create new tourist opportunities. 

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Certainly it had worked for us.  The few places where the mining heritage showed through just added interest.  The foliage has thoroughly taken back the hills above Betsy, and there are nice paths linking the different lake cradling valleys.  Jill was of course right about the waymarking.  The funniest thing is that there were a fair number of markers, but they were only in places where the trail was unmistakable.  Anyplace there was a decision to make where it looked like our route could go one of several ways there would be no marks.

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Fortunately, there are numbers of roads and tracks through the forests most of which diverge and remeet.  Even when the real paths didn’t quite match the map, we could always find something that kept us going in the right direction and get to all the destinations we wanted to find.  We didn’t see any other walkers out on Monday.  We passed or were passed by a few cyclists on some of the forest roads, which are perfect for intermediate mountain bikers and clearly attract quite a few.  A few times we passed park operated picnic areas and often saw a few couples at each one.

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Our big social stop for the day was a tea break at the Crafnant Lakeside Café.  When we showed up at mid afternoon, there was one woman running the place, and she was in a panic as she had us and two other customers to deal with.  We ordered tea, sandwiches, and scones – traditional afternoon tea for which we were well ready after 8 or so miles of walking.  While we (and the other two who had ordered before us) were waiting, we chatted with the other customers.  One of them was a fellow who was born in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region> then moved away to the midlands to make a living and had recently moved back to semi retire.  He gave us his view of what was best to see and do around <st1:place w:st="on">North Wales</st1:place>, much of which we have since done.  He made me feel very good to be a visitor here.  He made it clear how much the area relies and has relied on a long time for visitors for business.  He also gave me the impression that the Welsh have survived for so long by figuring out how to simultaneously take things seriously and lightly.

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Eventually, our food and drink showed up.  We ate at a table on the lake shore and amused ourselves watching people and birds fish.  Several other parties came in with whom we visited a bit.  Everyone was gratifyingly impressed that we had walked there from Betsy.

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Fed and refreshed, we walked back to the village by way of a few more lakes then a walk along one of the many rivers – I can’t remember and couldn’t pronounce or spell which one.  Some of the way, we followed a rough path that clung precariously to the steep bank.  Other times, we got tired of that and climbed up to a forest road that was just above that path.  We walked by and got a nice view of a waterfall called <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Swallow</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Falls</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>.

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Garmin Facts:  15.8 miles in 6:05 walking and 3:00 resting for 2.6 mph moving and 1.7 mph overall with 821 meters climbed.

Oxford to Wales in a day

It is Wednesday afternoon.  Sara and I are in Café Active above the Cotswolds Rock Bottom shop, it’s basically a little coffee shop above an outdoor store.  They’ve got ISDN dial up which isn’t broadband, but it’s a little better than regular dial.  Sara is checking email and doing a little fragment of work she has to do every Wednesday.

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She showed up in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Oxford</st1:City></st1:place> right on time.  We pushed her bags into the car then wandered the city for a little.  She had forgotten to bring a hat and found a nice one in a boutique.  We bought sandwiches and a dressed baked potato for a picnic and ate it in a churchyard off a quiet square.  <st1:City w:st="on">Oxford</st1:City> is a very pretty city, and after the north of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region> and the rural southwest, it was a surprise to be somewhere so busy and so full of young people.

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The drive up to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region> was uneventful.  We caught each other up on what we’d been doing the last four weeks.  By far, this was the longest we’d been apart since we met, so it was a lively talk.  Sara told me there were nice views from the car when the highway was above the ground around, I was mostly riveted to the road.  We zipped along motorways for most of the trip until the highway turned into rural road about 30 miles from our destination.  From there, it was something like backroads <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">West Virginia</st1:place></st1:State> driving except the roads were narrower and most of the other drivers more courteous.

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We got into Betws-y-Coed late in the afternoon.  Our host at the Courthouse Inn, Mark Henlly, showed us around the place and gave us particulars about when breakfast was and where they had tourist info.  He and his wife Jill are both very well suited to the hospitality business and have been as helpful with information as they have been careful of our comfort.  The building was in fact a courthouse until sometime in the middle of the 20th century.  The rooms are all named for functions that were performed there.  We’re in the fingerprint room.  It’s a good sized room and we get the neighbor’s well tended garden as our view.  We’ve been very comfortable.

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Mark and Jill had also given us restaurant recommendations in the village.  After unpacking and settling in, we went for a walk that took us first across the nearby River Conwy then around the fringe of a golf course.  We did some window shopping, mostly comforting ourselves with the reflection that we didn’t need anything.  Had dinner in the grill room of the <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Royal Oak</st1:place></st1:City> – lambs liver just for the adventure which wound up being pretty good.

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No measured walking on Sunday, but I’m sure I ran up at least 5 miles between wandering Oxford and our orientation walk around Betsy, as we’ve heard people abbreviate the name of the village.