SomersTownLisa

London Life
2022-11-02 16:20:15 (UTC)

Snowdonia

Wed 26/10/2022
We had breakfast in the hotel then went on bus trips through the fantastic Snowdonia scenery, a range of large unspoiled green mountains and valleys, with no roads spoiling he view except the one the bus was on. We’d been on some of these journeys a few years ago, but being Wales, the view then was obscured by heavy rain.

The first bus was to Llanberis. We’d decided to get the bus an hour earlier than we needed, which meant it didn’t connect with the first mountain railway, but gave me time to explore Llanberis which is a larger village than it looked like from the bus stop, had a typical large Welsh church on a little hill, and offered a windmill up a path, according to the sign.

I went up the path, along a road through houses, then a sharp diagonal right up another hill and although it seemed I could hear the waterfall, I wondered if I was going to be able to get to it. Astonishingly, when I did arrive, it was hard to see very well, being obscured by trees and a railway line.

The booking office didn’t sell hot drinks as promised, and the café Jack sent me to wouldn’t do soya latte. At the railways station there was a printed paper sign, stuck over the nicely painted one, offering group tickets such as “2 adults and 2 children £26 / 2 adults and 4 children £35”. One adult ticket is £9.50, so the price per child is actually greater if you’ve got more of them.

It was a pleasant journey along the water, with a hill the other side, but not spectacular. It was a good thing we had a little wooden compartment to ourselves, as there wasn’t much room to sit. There was a chance to get out on the way back and look across the lake.
We stopped by the window at a small café in Llanberis, which seemed to have room for about twelve people. This time we got off the bus at Swallow Falls, which we’d wanted to see yesterday. It’s actually a spectacular succession of several bits of steep waterfall and sloping rapids next to each other, as the river gradually turns a corner, and when we decided to leave, we found there was also a lower set of falls. Well worth a visit, even though they charge.

We sat by the football pitch in Betws-y-Coed (“coed” is the Welsh word for trees – we’d seen it on a couple of road names elsewhere in Snowdonia) then got the bus round the hill to Zip World. As we got a meal in the café before exploring our options, it was too late to have a go on the taboggans ourselves, but we enjoyed watching others do it and work out the course, which rose slowly then came down fast round sharp curves. They weren’t in a trench but on central rails. There were also several zip-wire causes.

After a quick lie down in our lodge, we went back to the Gwydyr and got the vegan lasagne we missed last night. It was quite small for £16 but that’s the cost-of-living crisis




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