Trips

Mon., 6/13/16 – Cheltenham to Llangollen and Caernarfon, Wales
        This was a day of driving, mostly on good roads or motor ways.
        We drove through Worcester where Lea and Perrins made their Worcester Sauce and Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan still hand-assembles cars.  There is a three-year wait for your specific choices on your Morgan car.
        Eventually, we crossed into Wales and Liz tried to teach us some Welsh words.  Her husband is Welsh and she is good at getting her tongue around the unusual sounds.
        Wales has only 5 million people.  There are coal mines in the south and slate mines in the north.  Welsh and English are official languages.  Welsh is the common language in the north.  Cardiff, in the south, is the capital. Wales has been ruled by England since 1284 and was incorporated into Great Britain in 1535.
        Wales is called the “Land of Song” because of their love of music, the many, many choirs, and the many music festivals that are hosted throughout the year.  Chief among the festivals is the National Eisteddfod.
        We stopped to have “lunch on our own” – meaning not included – in Llangollen.  Marge and I shared a large “oggie” and after lunch wandered around the town some more in a light rain.

	An oggie is a pastie the miners took for a meal to be eaten in the mine.  It has a large crust on the meat and vegetable pastry.  The men would hold it by the crust with their dirty hands, eat the good stuff, and then throw the dirty crust away.  We ate the whole thing.
River Dee	Veggies
	Train station
Sidewalk medallions	Sidewalk medallions
Ruins of Castell Dinas Bran	After lunch, we drove through Betws-y-Coed where we had stayed on our last trip to Wales, passed by the Ugly House again, and then into Snowdonia National Park.  The scenery is wonderful with dry stone walls up and down and across the hillsides separating sheep pastures and farms.  We had a photo stop at Lake Ogwen.
This idiot had a real fire in the stove inside the camper!	Stone walls and sheep
Stone walls and mountains	On our arrival in Caenarfon we drove around the castle built in 1280 by King Eduard I.  It is grand and defensive looking from the outside but the inside is empty.  Edward I ran out of money so he only had the towers and walls built.  However, QE II crowned her son Charles in the Caernarfon Castle to make him the Prince of Wales when he turned 21.
Caernarfon Castle	David Lloyd George
Sir Hugh Owen (no relative, as far as I know)	Neat building
It says Celtic Royal Hotel	We checked into the Celtic Royal Hotel and then got ready for our “home-hosted” dinner.  A taxi drove six of us to a very nice meal with Kevin and Eleri Jones.  He is a 7th and 8th grade biology teacher and Eleri works in Caernarfon as a government clerk. We had wonderful potato leek soup, a Welsh beef stew with carrots, mushrooms, peas and new potatoes, fresh baked rolls, and rhubarb (from their garden) and strawberry crumble with cream.  We all cleaned our plates and ate way too much; it was all so good.  They spoke to us in English, but Welsh is the language they speak at home and work. They told us a lot about their life in Wales.
You may, or may not, recognize the top panel as a train ticket to the Welsh village with the longest name in the world. It is often just referred to as Llanfair PG. Kevin said he and his brother used to take the train there when they were kids and stand on the platform and pronounce the name in hopes of being given coins by arriving passengers.         The lower panel is the menu for our home-hosted dinner.
Tues., 6/14/16 – Caernarfon and Llanelltyd, Wales         Today we left our group because they were doing the optional tour to the Roman ruins of Segontium, riding the Festiniog Railway to Porthmadog, and to Portmerion.  We did this trip in 2013.  Instead, we again rented a car for the day and went to find the village of Llanelltyd where Marge’s great-great-grandfather and his family immigrated from.  A taxi took us to Eurocar where we were given a small, stick shift, Vauxhall 4-door sedan.                With what maps we had gathered, we set off driving south through Snowdonia NP.  The rain had not yet begun so we stopped often to take pictures of the hills, lakes, walking/hiking paths, sheep pastures, and dry stone walls.  We stopped at a parking area at Cuellyn to use the provided porta-potties.  Somewhere we lost the A4085, probably in Beddgelert, and ended up west of Betws-y-Coed. We stopped in the pouring rain at a cafe and got relocated. From there we able to get on the A470 an continue our journey.
Today's drive from Caernarfon to Llanelltyd through Snowdonia National Park. You can probably see where we missed our turn and went NE instead of SE. It was a pretty drive, anyway.
Lovely, narrow roads	At least there is a translation
Llyn (lake) Cwellyn	Wales is full of walking paths
Scenery	Stone walls and hills
Scenery	The narrow roads continue through towns but they add curbs and park in one of the two lanes.
If you are in the parking lane, you yield to the oncoming traffic.	This guy didn't get the message so I waited.
Finally heading south on the A470 we managed to locate Llanelltyd. (Approximate pronunciation is Clan-ech-tud as the LL sounds sort of like ch or th.) It is only a small village with a few houses on a hill but with three churches.  The Peniel Calvinistic Methodist church, where Marge’s great-grandfather was christened, is now someone’s house.  One chapel looked deserted and only the third church had a cemetery.  We found this out from a nice lady who stood in the light rain holding a bulb of garlic she had borrowed from a neighbor.  She invited us to stay in her home until the man who served as the local historian returned from work.         We took some pictures and wandered through the old cemetery.  It was raining hard again and the grass had not been cut so we got quite wet trying to read names and dates on old gravestones.  Eventually we gave up because the stones were often covered with moss or the writing worn off.  It was obvious though, from all of the Owen names, that some of Marge’s family must be buried there.	(From a moving car)
Llanelltyd Village	Llanelltyd Village Hall
Satellite view of Llanelltyd and surrounding area
Llanelltyd Village	Saint Illtud Church and Cemetery
Llanelltyd Village	Peniel Calvinistic Methodist Church - now a private home
Saint Illtud Church Cemetery	We drove to the adjacent town, Dolgellau, and found a parking lot and a cafe/tearoom.  We warmed up with a bowl of homemade broccoli soup with Stilton cheese and cream and dark bread.  It was very good.  We took the A496 and A4085 back to Caernarfon.  We found the sign for Dyffryn Ardudwy burial chamber but would have had to take a walking path to find the site.  Since it was seriously raining, we skipped it.  We did park and take pictures of Harlech Castle and we drove through a town that had a circle of standing stones.  It wasn’t on our area map or we would have made it a scheduled stop.
Lunch	Looking out at the Irish Sea - tide's out again
Harlech Castle	Harlech Castle
Harlech Castle
We hurried back to Caernarfon to stop at the castle before it closed to buy a book, Anglesey: A Guide to Ancient Monuments on the Isle of Anglesey, on standing stones in Anglesey.  We were unable to get this little book before we drove around Anglesey two weeks ago. It surely would have been helpful!         We returned the car with a full petrol tank (16.00 GBP and only drove 100 miles) and the company drove us back to our hotel.  It was still raining and a hot shower felt wonderful.         Tonight we met Liz and walked down to the town theater to listen to a local all-male choir rehearse.  It was absolutely wonderful and we bought their CD.  The choir has a dynamic young female director/conductor and a female pianist/accompanist.  The 50 men filled the small rehearsal room with music sung in wonderful four or more part arrangements for male voices.  Some of their members were missing because they were in France rooting for the Welsh soccer team at the European Championships (where they got to the semi-finals!).
Caernarfon Male Voice Choir	Caernarfon Castle from our hotel window in the morning light

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