The plan didn't exactly go according to plan.
To start with I was getting over severe sleep deprivation from a series of late nights, including a rather long and hard fought poker night at Sam's to celebrate his distribution deal with a known record label. Of course, kids, in poker there are NO WINNERS.
Anyway, Alex decided that it woud be best to leave at 6 in the morning and drive get to North Wales nice and early, which is such a foreign idea to me. We took in a fried breakfast in Chester, on the basis that everyone there would look like (or perhaps be a part of) Hollyoaks. There was the beautiful drug addict with fake purple-ringed eyes, the tight-tracksuit bottomed girls (body doubles judging by their faces) and the matronly mother figures.
My directions brought us up 3 miles short and we had an extra-long headstart walk around the headland called Little Orme and Great Orme. Great Orme is a nature reserve, and the cafe will gladly sell you a certificate saying you walked all the way around it for £1.50.
The weather man couldn't make his mind up all week. We stayed at a YHA in Conwyn Bay on Monday night, and checked the weather in the morning, which basically said it was going to piss on us from a great height with gales and hurricanes and piss.
Given that my priority for the week was to do Mount Snowdon (the tallest mountain in Wales), we hopped it back to Alex's car by bus, got over there and yomped it over to the start of the path up, with one bag filled with emergency stuff and a couple of beers.
The path up the side of Snowdon from Pen Y Pass is a broad bridleway covered in gravel. You could ride up it on a bike easily and the whole thing was a bit dissapointing until we good to the last 200 metres or so of big, bad vertical hill. Then I got my walk head on, fumed, "Right!" and stomped up half a mountain . I spent the next two days whinging about my broken left arse, where I had strained a buttock muscle.
Here's a couple of snaps I took on my phone. The first is from a hotel which let us camp on some nearby grass and have a little bonfire. They were very talkative and I got the feeling that they didn't get much custom this time of year and were a bit desperate for a couple of lads to prop up the bar all night. I had a really nice time there, though, and dnk plenty of vitamin-rich stout for 'energy'
The other picture is from a wall we walked passed and then started furiousy snapping pictures of with our phones as it had really nice moss:
2 comments:
Did you buy a certificate?
I should have done really. But seeing as anyone could drive around the Orme at 10mph in a car, waddle out, get some cake and a certificate and waddle back to their car again seemed to make the whole thing a bit of a fraud.
I would have hung it just above my Land's End John o'Groats certificate if I had (and if I'd hung my LEJOG cert).
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