Friday

Hello friends,
I didn't write anything yesterday because, well, I didn't.  :)  But that doesn't mean we didn't do anything.  Actually, I think I needed last night to recover from the day.  We went to bed around 9 local time Thursday (4 PM to my friends in Michigan) and I made everyone get up at 7.  We slept really well - I think after the previous two days we could hardly have done otherwise.  The beds in the house are really comfortable, which helps. 

Anyway, I got everyone up at 7, and we had cereal from the convenience store (the little boxes of individual cereals), and got in the car around 8 AM.  I was parked facing downhill on the side of the road next to the house, not very well, because I'm not great at parallel parking despite having learned to drive in the Boston environs (well, maybe because of it), and I would have had to parallel park going in reverse uphill with a stick shift.  As it was we had to look in the manual to figure out how to get the 6-speed Peugeot into reverse at all - apparently there's a trick to it. 

There seems to be a trick to everything around here.  It took me several tries to lock the house door deadbolt with the key, and that was just after monkeying aound with it (you have to pull the door handle up all the way past neutral to engage the upper bolts, and THEN you can turn the  key to lock the lower one).  Sheesh.  There does not seem to be a pilot light for the stove - luckily I had a book of matches in my first aid kit, so we've been lighting the burners with those.  There is a washer/dryer combination with cryptic symbols on the front; so far I've not been able to run a drying cycle without running a washing cycle first.  Yesterday it was cloudy and a bit rainy, and there is no place in the house to suspend my laundry line except underneath the railing on the stairs, which doesn't get a lot of air circulation, but it is what it is.

Anyway, we left for Llanberis, where we had tickets to catch the Snowdon Mountain Railway at 9.  It's about 13 miles, or 35 minutes in the car, and I did not start out well.  I drove better than the previous day (haven't burned out the tranny yet) but I still hit the curb several times, had trouble finding 3rd gear (downshifting into 1st when you want third is discouraging, to say the least), plus the roundabouts come up so suddenly that I think I cut a few people off, quite unintentionally.  Then I took the wrong exit off the roundabout and ended up on a different highway, and had to go several miles on winding narrow unmarked roads with people hot on my tail before I found a place to turn around.  My phone does not appear to have internet service - when I called the company last night, the very friendly and helpful customer service person, Meghan, helped me find out that basically North Wales' internet is "under construction," and is "blacked out."  She stayed past closing to try to help me with it.  We'll see how it works at our next location.  The upshot of that is that if I didn't drive on a dowloaded route, the "rerouting" didn't work on the GPS and took me off the map, and the paper map we have is of the entire country, so not good for finding turnarounds. 

We did make it (barely) to the 9 o'clock train - first we pulled into the Slate Museum site, and found out that the tran was another mile further down the road.  Then I couldn't find parking, but dropped off the family and ordered them to go get the tickets.  Found the less-well-marked lot across the road (almost in tears by this time from the stress of driving and getting lost), and made it to the train, last people on. 

The train ride up the mountain was almost an hour, and was very pretty, except once we got into the clouds, which was also knd of pretty, but not very scenic.  I think it was supposed to be bad weather all weekend, and I had to buy the tickets a month in advance, so it was what it was.  We went to the summit anyway; they gave us 40 minutes to walk around and try not to get lost in the mist and fall off a cliff....  There were sheep everywhere, with very long tails and long fleeces - looked as if they needed to be shorn.  The landscape (once we got back down) was rather impressive.  We spoke to the other people in our compartment, and one couple was from England and told us to go a little farther west to Caernarfon Castle.  So after we got back down the mountain, we did.  We had better success with that, because the nice clerk at the gift shop for the Mountain Railway drew us a crude map of where the car park was, and golly, there it was. 

We wandered around Caernarfon and then went to the castle, which is a National Heritage Site, and is where the Prince of Wales (Prince Charles) was  - dang, I forget the word, starts with an "I" - well, crowned Prince of Wales, anyway, in 1969.  The castle is a big, rambling shell on the coast.  We stopped partway through and got lunch at a place on Hole in the Wall Street (where there is a big gap in the wall between the castle and the town).  That's where I saw the knickerbocker glory ingredients, for anyone who is following on FaceBook.  One more Harry Potter mystery solved.

We went back to the castle until our jet lag caught up with us, and then drove back home to Conwy, where I collapsed from the driving stress again.  We had leftovers for dinner from Thursday night (Italian food) and watched a movie (Miss Congeniality) and went to bed. 

Which I think I'm goign to do now.  Today we went to Llandudno and I drove much better.  More about that another time.

blessings
wendy