Bikes and castles
21 August 2019
Paul Barker
I traveled by bus 🚌 and train 🚂 to Bangor in North Wales 🏴 where I was met by Rachel who brought me to a lovely old cottage/farmhouse that belonged to her grandfather, it was built in the mid 1500s, it has slate and oak floorings, and oak beams, the door 🚪 latches are also made out of oak. They also own a camp site here with a lake that took me over an hour to walk around and a large farm in New Zealand.
We drove to Porthmadog to the boat ⛵️`Tokimata` then sailed across the bay to the marina where she will have a few jobs done and we will provision her up for our trip to Tangier’s in Morocco 🇲🇦.
Because there is nothing that I can help with. Pete said I could take a mountain 🏔 bike 🚲 and go for a ride, this was ok until I tried to go off road, where my foot 🦶 started to slip off the pedal, so after about 4 attempts the decision was to stick to the roads. I looked at the map on my phone and chose the route to take, it looked alright so I peddled on, after a while, I stopped for a coffee then about an hour further, I stopped at a railway station 🚉 cafe, I had a lovely onion and herb soup 🍜 with two bread 🥯 rolls. I chatted for a while with a lady who has a friendly spaniel dog 🐕. Then I set off again, this is where the hills started to go up and got increasingly longer. I think 🤔 I climbed about 7 or 8 miles up to Betwsy-Coed then to Capel Curig, when I got to the final 2 miles which were down hill back to the farmhouse the head wind was bad, so I had to pedal to keep going forward and down. I did 43.9 miles and now my legs are in ribbons 🎀. It was a hard day because of the lack of riding I have done over the last 2 years.
Today Pete suggested that I might like to catch the bus to Caernarfon and take a look around the castle 🏰, which I did. It took about an hour to get there, the castle and walls are huge, it is in great condition, there are video shows and a museum to give an idea of its history, it has on display the Royal Welsh fusiliers history and some of their uniforms and medals 🏅 including many Victoria Cross awards and a stuffed goat. I think there are 9 towers but for me much too many steps up and down there were many other visitors there. They supplied a good selection of swords and shields for the kids to play with, (I so wanted to pick one up and have a battle with them) it looked so much fun