Life Without Toast - Sibling Rivalry

Apologies for the lateness of this post (seeing as I came back from Wales on Sunday night).

Well, an excellent weekend was what was had in beautiful Snowdonia. I was there last summer, but only really passed through quickly, on the way to the English Midlands. We got the HSS from Dun Laoghaire (which was handy, as in 5 minutes away) on Friday morning and got to the caravan park (via a nice drive on the A4086, a really good drive, and at least two wrong turns that may or may not have been due to map-reading errors by my trusty navigator) at about half past four, just in time for several pints and dinner in the country club, followed by an early night (relatively anyway) in anticipation of a dayincluding 'a fair bit of walking'.

After a breakfast of pastries and coffee which had been cunningly purchased in Bangor on the way to our wheeled weekend abode, we debated joining the others for a hike up Snowdon. After looking at the torrential hail, rain, sleet and snow that looked pretty imminent, and our poor choice of non-waterproof clothing and footwear, and thinking of a 5-hour hike up a mountain and back, we decided (wisely) against it. So we went on a drive to Betws-y-Coed and a bit of a shop for appropriate clothing for future hillwalking adventures, some lunch, and to find a smaller walk to go on. We found a nice lake up in the mountains (I can't remember the name) and had a wee (2 hour or so) walk in the sunshine that broke as soon as we got out of the car, took some lovely photies, and then headed back to the caravan to chill for a bit. Dinner on Saturday was to be a gigantic pot of Bolognaise, made by Kabbage, (fiancé of Ciara, who's 30th birthday was the real reason for being in Wales, as I mentioned previously) up in a shack in the middle of nowhere, followed by several games of pool and copious drinking back at the park.

On Sunday we had to be checked out of our caravans at 10am, so we all (about 28 of us) headed out to get breakfast in a roadside café that Ciara had found would probably have space for all of us. After a few goodbyes and a look around the outdoor clothing shop that was attached to the café (every other business in Snowdonia is an outdoor clothing shop, you'll find), Nikki, Deirdre, Claire and myself (the Irish contingent) parted company with the rest of the gang and headed back to Betws (and yet another outdoor shop or three), and on to Electric Mountain. This was an excellent detour, a pumped storage power station deep underneath a mountain, that looked more like something out of the last half hour of a James Bond movie than anything I've ever seen. To say I was a bit pissed off when our guide said we had to leave our cameras and phones in lockers at the start of the tour would be a colossal understatement. The main cavern of the station is hundreds of metres underground (about a ten-minute bus journey down a huge tunnel in a bus), and is over 125 metres long, and I really expected a bald supervillain to pop out of somewhere and snicker maniacally at his creation. Visit Electric Mountain, it's cool.

From there we headed to Bangor (where it seems absolutely nothing happens on a Sunday) for some lunch, and on to Holyhead for the 6.30pm ferry back to the Pale. An excellent weekend I'm sure you'll agree!