WALES

This past weekend me & most of my roommates went on a trip with IFSA-Butler to Llanberis, Wales! It was our "Adventure weekend," which is a pre-planned weekend for all the IFSA students to go on and it was super outdoorsy. The bus ride was about 6 hours and we left Friday morning and got there Friday around 5/6 PM. We stayed at a pretty nice hotel and after dinner me & Jess holed up in our room and watched Titanic....me + Jess + Titanic= so many tears

Saturday, we woke up so early to go hiking on a slate mountain. It was absolutely freezing since the sun wasn't out and it was so, so windy, but after we started the hike it wasn't so bad :)

A Welsh castle -- Dolbadarn Castle

 view from a window -- the lake area stretches out to the sea I think

 The castle used to have different floors and a ceiling but I guess they've all collapsed

I went on the half day hike so we were only on the mountain for about 3 hours. The walk up the mountain was pretty much all rugged stairs and it was a slightly hard, quad burning, mostly reasonable, hike up.

 The mountain we went up used to be a big slate mining place & these are the small villages where some of the slate miners would live. I think he said these were used in the 18th & 19th centuries

 Fireplace-- the whole thing was made of slate like this

 piles of broken slate

 view from about halfway up

Apparently Llanberis is right at the foot of Snowdon, which is the tallest mountain in Wales, but only the full-day hikers got to climb it & I'm definitely not cut out for a full day of hiking... and it ended up being too windy and cold for them to get to the top anyways 

 This is as high as we would go, you can see another house and behind it, an old slate transport system going up the mountain

 View out to sea

 Even with the clouds, there was still a great view :) These last couple of pics were taken out at a viewing platform that was experiencing hurricane winds...it was so loud it was hard to hear people talk and you could lean so far back because the wind would support you

We also browsed around the town Friday evening and calling Llanberis a town is being generous. There was one main street, almost everything was closed since it was the off season and there was NO ONE around and very few cars

 Welsh sounds funny

Then, Sunday morning we went to Llandudno, which is right on the northern coast of Wales. We walked along the pier, saw some crazy sheep dogs, got lunch & headed back to London.

Next: Barcelona on Wednesday!