Wales Highlights

Just before I left for Wales, my trusty laptop (that I'd had for five years, apparently far longer than they're "supposed" to last) died suddenly.

Since then, I've been running my life from the serviceable but small and frustrating netbook that I usually only use for travel. This makes my life more difficult in a number of ways, just one of which is that it's harder (impossible) to sort and edit photos... So what you're getting for now is a summary, rather than an album.

We (a motley crew of six Germans/Scots/Americans that came together around our main organizer, Kat) stayed in this cozy cottage amid the sheep pastures outside the tiny village of Llandrillo:

When we got there at almost the end of March, Wales was still covered in deep snow (fun for us, but not so much so for the shepherds trying to save their lambs) and even more deeply up high in the hills. We did a lot of hikes that started off like this, walking uphill in the snow, under the wary gaze of skittish sheep:

Here's another view from that same first day's hike, where we took a narrow-gauge steam train along lovely Lake Bala and then hiked our way back through the snowy hills: 

The next day we started out right from our front door, just walking straight up into the hills, and had possibly the most beautiful hike of the whole week, in the Berwyn Mountains. The snow was deep up there! Look at those fenceposts disappearing into it: 

The best part of all that snow: Sledding our way back down the mountain!

Day 3 felt almost like a rest day; we went into the pretty-but-touristy town of Llangollen (almost a shock to the system, to see so many people after all the solitude, and to be able to buy necessities like sunblock and ice cream!) and took an easy 10-kilometer ramble in the countryside around the town, seeing its sights (a canal, an abbey, a castle ruin) and of course visiting a cafe for a cream tea!

Here's an accidental Beatles impression on Abbey Road (Ffordd yr Abaty, literally "Road of the Abbey") in Llangollen:

On our last full day together before some of the group departed, we went into Snowdonia National Park, right to the foot of Mount Snowdon itself.

Here's Snowdon in all its icy glory. We only got as far as a bit of the way up the slope between two lakes located at its foot; apparently, to go much further up we would have needed ice axes!

It was very cold and very windy, and we ended up traversing a steep, slipperly, icy slope on what definitely turned out to be not actually the path. Believe it or not, this here was the least scary part of that hike:

From Llandrillo in the center of northern Wales, I continued on alone to Anglesey, the island that sits at the northwest tip of Wales. I stayed at a friendly, outdoorsy hostel a three-kilometer walk outside of Holyhead, on Holy Island, which is a smaller piece again off the edge of Anglesey. 

Like all of Anglesey, Holy Island has all sorts of Iron Age sites, as well as abundant natural beauty, and I spent a day happily exploring. Here are the hut circles, excavated Iron Age settlements:

The north of Holy Island is made up of dramatic cliffs plunging into the sea; from the top of the "mountain" (not very high, but entirely striking, an otherworldly shape of bare stone like something off of the moon) you can see in one direction across all of Anglesey and back to Snowdonia, to Ireland in another, and on a very clear day even out to the Isle of Man.

Here's the lighthouse at South Stack:

And because I have a weakness for standing stones (as I discovered when I was on the Isle of Lewis, in Scotland) I went to find Holy Island's own standing stones - which turned out to be incongruously in the middle of a cattle pasture, framed between a barn and power lines.

Loved Anglesey and would recommend it to anyone; loved Wales as a whole. Loved hearing Welsh spoken - how fantastic. Wales Wales Wales!