Wales, take 1!

Lucky me, I went to Wales not once but twice in September.

Trip number one took me to Snowdonia. Despite having charged through a few times, it was the first time I stayed there for a week and my head soon spun at just how much there is to do in the area.

It was nice to meet up with a prospective Airstreamer, Greg, who was renting a cottage nearby. He came over for dinner a few times and we did a daytrip or two.

One of our trips was to the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth. It makes for an interesting day out, and one of the nice things is that some of the ideas presented range from what you can implement that very evening at home to how you can completely replan your life. The nice PR lady explained that they are now suffering a bit of a dilemma. What was ground-breaking environmental technology 5 years ago is commonplace today. So some of the exhibits show what everyone now does rather than what we could be doing. It's good in a way, but of course renewing stuff for the sake of it isn't really green.

Next morning I headed to Coed-y-Brenin which is one of the premier Mountain Bike Centres in the UK. I had a great ride on one of the trails, and as I was there at 7am I had the place to myself.






I also had an interesting visit to a slate mine museum which provided a fascinating insight into the roots of modern Welsh culture. I would loved to have done some more trips like ride the steam railways, but I was 'working' and had to press on to my next site at Caernarfon.

I really liked Caernarfon. Of course, it's always a bonus when the town is a 10 minute stroll from the site. A beautiful little harbour guarded by a majestic castle that commanded fabulous views of Snowdon.

I wanted to climb that hill, but sadly the day after I snapped this pic the clouds rolled in and it didn't seem sensible to do the ascent on my own, and I didn't fancy the £25 on taking a diesel train up there just to stand in cloud. So 'Climbing Snowdon' is now on my to-do list.

From there it was a mad dash to Tebay to drop off the Airstream for its annual service. My next trip to Wales was going to have a different flavour...