Graham & Dave do Wales

In 2006 Graham Nicol and I rode to Spain for a fantastic biking holiday, see our report here,  but unfortunately this year we could only manage a weekend so where to?  In his Army days Graham had some adventures in Snowdonia and he wanted to share his knowledge with me so he was the leader of this trip.  Being an Army type Graham wanted to camp but at 56 camping is not in my vocabulary so I managed to persuade Graham the joys of Bunkhouse accommodation; basically for the price of camping but with walls and roof and in the case of Caban-cysqu (I should have taken the trouble to find out what that means, sorry) hot water too.  I was really surprised that we got our own rooms and the five Scouts had the dormitory; a concession for age methinks.

So it was a half day from work and we met up in Northallerton for the couple of hundred mile ride to North Wales and Snowdonia.  Motorways have their place in the scheme of things but Friday pm the M62 is along the lines of 'Nightmare'!  Bethesda is a quiet place and our Bunkhouse was in Gerlan a suburb of Bethesda, even more quiet.  The only food to be had at 8:30 in the evening was at Ogwen Bank Caravan Park, I can strongly recommend the Steak & Ale pie, mmmmmm.  But it was not all good news as we had to endure England receiving their greatest defeat in World Cup Rugby at the hands of the Springbok; a 36:0 drubbing whilst in Wales was not a good start to the weekend!

But riding the Pass of Llanberis early on Saturday morning was stunning, too good for mere words or pictures you must promise yourself to ride that road; and at the end in Llanberis is Pete's Cafe which completes the euphoria.  The pass was so good we set the days route so we could ride it 3 times!

Next stop was Betws-y-coed and a new pair of walking trousers for me; with Bikers Discount!  Riding around this neck of the woods was like a game of scrabble, every town name looked unusual, even the road signs were in English and Welsh so the increase of slippery plastic writing on the road doubled.

In 1276 Longshanks (Edward 1st) decided to tame the Welsh and part of that was the building of castles, here's Harlech:

and not far up the road one of Longshanks best in Caernarfon Castle and I got all arty with my photography:

I skipped over the fact that we visited Portmeiron, famous for the Prisoner TV series in 1967, the reason for this was Graham bought his wife some Portmeiron china pieces and Jen got a bag of Black Bullets.  It is a weird place but if you're in the area.......

Riding ended at:

So you can now practice saying it!  For the ride home on Sunday we left early to avoid the forecasted rain, which we managed, also to avoid Motorways which we managed in parts, we had a glorious ride across the North York Moors north of Skipton and the Zumo550 worked flawlessly.

All in all a brilliant weekend which was all about the riding, my Ulysses was the best, my new Touratech boxes worked extremely well and the new Zumo550 Touratech vibration isolation mount did the business too; where to next Graham?