A week in Wales
Helloooo,
I’ve just come back from a very wonderful week in Wales… A week of sunny weather, red noses, beaches, mountains, bridges and chocolate eggs 🙂
Paul’s parents have a house in North Wales, very near the coast. It’s actually located in the Snowdonia National Park. We drove there on Tuesday evening, it takes about 6 hours!
The next morning we went for a nice walk on the beach near the house, it’s very pretty. There were some swans there, sunbathing I guess 😉 The panorama photo I took doesn’t want to become straight so I just left it like this.
Later in the afternoon we went to Harlech Beach, a huge beach! We played with Paul’s boomerang, or actually, he played with it, I took photos of him (trying to!) catch it. We walked back through Harlech. The photo of the road is the first Welsh word I learnt… You can see it everywhere! Just like on my trip to/from Antarctica the Spanish word that stayed with me is “salida” (exit). Spent too much time in airports, hehe.
Another thing about Wales: they have LOTS of sheep… And we were there at the right time, little lambs everywhere… so cute!! Here is a photo of family Sheep and a sign about lambing time, in English and Welsh. Welsh is really complicated! It’s spoken quite a lot, but to me it always sounded East European in a way. They are very proud of their language and I saw many road signs where someone had tried to erase the English translation.
One day we went for a nice walk from Barmouth. There is a rail bridge that you can cross on foot for 70p 🙂 The bridge is beautiful and the views from the bridge are even better! We walked up to a quarry where they used to mine copper (if I’m correct). Now it’s just a pretty blue lake surrounded by high rock walls. The sport of the local youth is to jump down into the (very deep) lake. Ahh I would be so scared, you have to jump forward quite a bit to reach the water. It was fun watching them though! Here are the bridge photos…
The next day we went to Portmadog with Paul’s parents. We parked the car outside the little town and walked over the rail bridge. Another bridge with nice views 🙂 We also visited a cute little place in a bay that dries out at low tide (the tide differences are very big around there). See the panorama photo. The two first photos are taken from the bridge, one in the afternoon and one in the evening at sunset.
The next day we decided to climb a mountain nearby. This was quite an adventure as there was no path, lots of bogs (I stepped into a deep one, fortunately when we were almost back at the car!), lots of prickly bushes… But we made it to the top, the view was great!
At the top, there was one of those things that they used to measure distances, and we wanted to take a photo of us on it. In the first photo, the camera went off too early, hehe.
Here is another photo taken at the top, and one of the mossy stream we saw on the way back.
The next day Paul went sailing with his dad, and I followed them from the shore and took some photos. There was a cute little dog trying to come on the boat with them 🙂
Later that day we went for a walk. We crossed the bay at low tide to get to a small island in the bay. We did have to take our shoes off and wade through a gully, but it was a very nice walk!
JUMP!
It was such an amazing week, we stayed longer than we planned to. We had a nice time with his parents as well. It started raining on Monday and when it was still cloudy on Tuesday, we decided to go back to Norwich. Of course the sunny weather came back on Wednesday, but well.
On the way back we stopped at a parking place next to the road and climbed up this mountain, the view was really great:
We drove back to Norwich last night. Paul was bored while I was driving, so he took some pictures of me…
That’s all… what a great Easter break! I’m looking forward to going back to Wales one day.
