Monday, April 26, 2010

Random trips around Wales


I am very lucky to have a friend that 1) has a car 2) is actually enjoys my company and 3) is willing to take me around to some places in North Wales so I can fully experience this area. So, thank you Dafydd.








The first little trip we took was to Portmeirion. A small charismatic village south of Denbigh. There are little shops and restaurants there, and it is right on the coast. There was a nice little walk to go on, and so much character to observe. We spent the afternoon there and got to see
the tide begin to go out, and walked through the woods, up the light house and through the village. We then carried on to Porthmadog, where some of his family is from. We visited the nursery and the harbor...sadly, I didn't take any pictures while we were there.



Next, we went Llanrhaeadr which is just outside of Denbigh, and it has its very own bath. Daf took me here after I got back from Bath. It was a nice little walk off the road, back into the trees, and behind a little church. He said they used to use it for baptisms and stuff. It was really neat to see some thing that the Welsh had built and was kept pretty much intact by nature.



The next little trip we went on was to Conwy, a place that I have been wanting to go to since before I even came to Wales! I wanted to see a big castle that was mostly intact. Sure, there is an awesome castle here in Denbigh that I spend a heck of a lot of time at, but it has
been through war and destruction, so it is just ruins now. Conwy is a seaside town that has a beautiful harbor that I just couldn't take my eyes off of. It has castle wall that enclose the old town, and you guessed it, I made Daf walk all the way around it. The views were lovely, and the houses were all interesting to look at. We picked up some sandwiches and flapjacks from a little deli in town and had lunch on the docks, shielding our food from the seagulls who are known to snatch food right off the table. That was a lovely day.


Yesterday, we headed off to Llandudno for the afternoon. It is just another seaside town, but there are lovely Victorian style houses and buildings that you can look at as you walk along to
promenade by the beach. It was a lovely day, weather-wise, yesterday. We walked out along the pier and got some great views of the coast. Then we meandered around town just to see the different buildings and round-abouts, where they had just planted huge beds of flowers so when the sea breeze blew you could take a deep breath and smell the flowers. It was gorgeous. We ate dinner at a place called Weatherspoons, where I had root beer for the first time since December. It was nice. Then we headed back to the car so we could drive up to the Great Orme (picture to the left), basically it is a huge rock/peninsula thing that you can go up on and get views for miles! When we got to the car though...it wouldn't start, so we spent about half an hour pushing the car over any incline in the parking lot that we could find to try and push start the car...No luck. So we decided to walk around and see if we could find anything else to push it
down within the near vicinity. We found a parking lot across the road the had a steeper incline so we pushed it over there and finally got it started. Glad i'm not a whimpy girl, otherwise we would have been seriously stranded. We got up to the Orme and drove around, found a nice place to watch the sun set and just relaxed. It was absolutely breathtaking!! And I don't even think the pictures I took do it justice.

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