(Written by Brian)
We all woke up rather early in Holyhead, Wales in order to get to our excursion on time. We got dressed, headed to a quick breakfast, then to the theater where we waited a good 40 minutes for our bus to finally be called. (Insert heavy sarcasm tone) Good thing we got up so early, we might have missed it!
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| Our Bus Tour to Conwy Castle |
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| Narrow road from Holyhead to the Cruise Ship |
Our excursion was to Conwy Castle, but I believe they didn’t have any options to just see that castle so we had to do it and shopping instead. So before the castle, we went to Beaumaris, a little town that also has a castle and some cute little shops. We went to a little craft fair they were having, saw a little exhibit on COVID that was depressing beyond all reason, walked a little by the castle there,
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| Beaumaris Castle |
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| Beaumaris Castle |
climbed down a little ladder to the sea shore, threw some little rocks to try and skip them in the wavy water (mostly unsuccessfully), and finally hurried a little so that we weren’t a little late back to the bus (did I get enough “littles” in there?).
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| View of Menai Strait and Mainland Wales |
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| Wales from the Isle of Anglesey |
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| Sea Wall |
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| Straight of Menai |
Oh, Devri also found these little beauties (shells).
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| Beaumaris Castle, Isle of Angelsey, Wales |
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| Where Beaumaris is located |
We rode again for a short trip to Conwy, and got to explore the castle there.
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| Leaving the Isle of Anglesey and headed to the mainland |
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| Famous Welsh Slate roofs |
This castle was little incredible. The most amazing thing is they really allowed you to explore the entire castle, and most of it is intact (except for the roofs). In fact, in a couple of places it made us a little nervous that they didn’t have extra barriers to prevent kids from climbing over the short walls and fall a long ways down, but that wasn’t too much of a concern for our kids. Mostly. We went up a few of the turrets.
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| Conwy Castle |
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| Conwy Castle |
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| View from one of the Conwy Castle turrets |
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| The Conwy River |
We also went up a little turret on top of one of the bigger turrets. Turret-ception, if you will. This was really amazing since you could see everything all around. I even took a panaroma shot to prove it. Ignore the deformed humans, they were not deformed in real life. Also, Devri usually has her eyes open before walking down stairs
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| On top of the turret on the turret |
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| River Conwy |
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| Snapdragons growing high up on the castle wall |
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| One of the fireplaces at Conwy |
As we were exploring, the kids at one point spilt off from us (it wasn’t so large a space that we were concerned we were going to lose them or anything), and Gabe and Michael both found friends they had made the previous day. Gabe’s friend, Oliver, is even from Bluffdale, UT, which is only about 20-30 minutes away from us. What are the chances?
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| Gabe from the top of the wall |
After exploring the castle some more, we took some group shots.
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| Model of Conwy Castle back in its zenith |
We then headed out to find food in the nearby town. After trying a couple of places that would be too slow, we found the equivalent of a fast food fish and chips place and then ordered everything but the fish and chips.
They even touted that they probably had the best fish and chips there. We probably missed out.
On recommendation of our tour guide, whose name I cannot remember even writing this the same day so let’s call her Eurwen (Yes, that’s a real welsh name, I even looked it up. Was it her name? I can neither confirm nor deny. Probably not, but there is a small chance that I got it right based on my search of “most unusual welsh girl names”.), we went and found the smallest house in Wales as well. We didn’t have time to go in and see it, but trust me, the camera adds 10 feet to the actual size of the house. This thing would fit hobbits fine, but not the 6’6” gentleman who actually lived here at one point.
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| The smallest house in Great Britain |
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| Conwy, Wales |
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| Conwy, Wales |
We got back to the bus with plenty of time to spare (a FULL minute I would have you know), but just so happened to still be the last people on the bus for unknown reasons. We’re not known for punctuality, ok? We then headed to our final stop: the beautiful town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. To answer the questions you all might have…no, we do not even have a cat, our dog is not on our cruise with us, the children are not in the room, and even if they were they know how to type and don’t just hit random letters anymore), and no, I did not have a stroke, heart attack, or any other serious health conditions strike while trying to type the name of the town. That is really it. To be fair, Devri did have a coughing fit while trying to read the letters back to me to make sure I got them all right, but she has since recovered and is doing well again. In short, no one was seriously hurt in the typing of this town name.
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| Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, Wales |
The guide told us that they originally had a different name, but back in the 1860s they intentionally wanted to rename it to something that would attract tourists so they basically took everything interesting about the town and put it into the name. It translates to “The church of Mary in the hollow of the white hazel near the fierce whirlpool and the Church of Tysilio by the red cave”. It’s 51 characters (in Welsh since “ch” and “ll” are single characters), the longest station name in Europe, and the second longest single word place name in the world (in case you are interested, the longest belongs to a hill in New Zealand that translates to “The summit where Tamatea, the man with big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one”. I mean, who can compete with the man with big knees playing his nose flute? No one.). This stop was ridiculous, but seriously one of my favorite things ever. We didn’t even do anything besides going into the big market they had at the train station and take a picture in front of the sign. We also had Eurwen (possibly her real name) say the place name for us so we had the original pronunciation.
To top it all off, when we got back on the bus, Eurwen (maybe it could a nick name of hers?) asked for volunteers to try to say the town name, and Gabe immediately jumped up to do it. He shocked us all when he very clearly and definitively pronounced something that could have been the real pronunciation if it was not in the Welsh language and was instead in a different language like English where 4 letter “L”s should not exist next to each other and “pwllgw” is not a valid combination of letters. We are super proud of him for trying, and it was pretty amazing. He definitely got a lot of cheers for making the attempt. But hey, at least I know what word to spell in scrabble next time I have too many “L”s.
We headed back to the ship. Fortunately, the rain didn’t hit hard until we were on the road, though it had been drizzling off and on since Conwy Castle. We made it back on the ship, the boys immediately went to go eat since they apparently forgot we were going to eat dinner in an hour, and then Rachel, Devri, and I headed to dinner together without said boys.
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| Rachel with one of the Guest Comedians after the show |
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| Where we were this day |
We had a pretty uneventful night, and as far as we know, the kids did too.
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