I woke up this morning with a rare (for me) stiff neck and headache, probably from sleeping on too many different pillows over the last two weeks. Headaches usually make me nauseous, and so it was, mildly, this morning. We ate a hurried breakfast because we had 10:00 tickets to take the train up Mt. Snowdon and we were about ninety minutes away. We got on the road a little after 7:30.

Good thing, too. The roads in the national park range anywhere from excellent to nigh imaginary. I had a headache, an upset stomach, winding one-lane roads with two-way traffic and short sightlines, and rain that ranged from drizzle to downpour with surprising variety. By the time I got to the parking lot at Mt. Snowdon, I was frazzled, ill, and spent. Then I had to figure out how to pay the fifteen-dollar parking fee. I tried four different machines, and none would recognize my worked-everywhere-else credit card, so I had to come up with fifteen dollars in coins. That’s not as bad as it sounds, since England has the equivalent of one- and two-dollar coins, but I still had to go buy a postcard to get some additional change. Add in a quick bathroom trip, and Mer and I ended up using all of the extra time we had given ourselves.

But then we got to do some serous butt-sitting tourism. We rode the train up about four and a half miles to get to the summit of the 3,500-foot mountain, the highest British mountain south of Scotland. The rain had mostly stopped as we boarded the train, and we had magnificent views of other mountains, valleys, a few lakes, and maybe the sea. We did hit a cloud layer a little over three quarters of the way up, and it was like being in a very thick fog. Still, the ride up and the ride down were brilliant for looking around.

One of the things that surprised me was the number of people on the footpath that wound alongside of us. It’s considered the easiest footpath up the mountain, and so it is the busiest, averaging over sixteen hundred people on Saturdays, which means much higher in summer. It meant that when we looked out the window down the trail, we saw a nearly constant stream of people. And this was on a day with dicey weather. It must be a madhouse on a sunny Saturday in summer. We even saw a team of people pulling an all-terrain wheelchair up the path. I hope they made it.

We did, of course. The train gives you a very strict thirty minutes at the top, and if you miss your train, you are probably walking down. A few hikers got off the train to walk down as planned, and those few spots were filled by cold and wet hikers who decided to pay to ride back down. The women who sat opposite us said they had taken about three hours to walk up in sun, rain, snow, lightning, and hail. I could understand why they were using the train.

We ate a quick lunch at the train base station, and then I had a decision to make. I wanted to do many things in Snowdonia, but only had time for one of them. I could go see the Hollow Mountain hydro power plant, or I could go see the mighty Caernarfon Castle on the sea, or I could go to the cute imitation Italian village of Portmeirion, or I could go see the moving Slate Mountain museum mine. In the end, I picked mini golf.

Not just any mini golf, of course. A local amusement chain called Zip World converts old slate mines into amusement centers with zip lines and trampolines and other such things, with most housed in the old mines. We’re staying the night in the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, which includes a branch of Zip World that has a mine-themed mini golf course four hundred feet underground. We had to put on helmets and everything. The course is eighteen holes on four different levels, and to go from hole sixteen to hole seventeen, you can take a slide down several of the course levels, after putting your club on a separate putter slide. Your ball would sink in hole sixteen, and you’d retrieve it from a tin bucket thirty feet below. There was great eighties music playing, and everything was lit in changing colors, and every hole had different obstacles inspired by mining, and all of this was in a huge cavern in an old slate mine. It was epic. And I won, too (although Meredith got the only hole in one), AND my headache finally went fully away in the cool of the mine.

We then checked in to our B and B and got something to eat from a family-run pizza place that included a very bohemian music stage. We ate our pizza on a couch facing the empty stage while music played over the speakers. It was very mellow.

After supper, I wanted to walk High Street and then go home, since I had had a rough driving day. I had seen a hike to a waterfall, but it was almost forty minutes round trip, and I was tired. But then I saw a road that went up and thought it might give a good view of the town and surrounding mountains. That led us to a path that I thought would take us to the waterfall, except it didn’t. But by then, we were over half way, so we kept going and got close to where we could see the falls, but not how to get there. So Meredith asked a local woman how to get up to them, and she said you couldn’t – there was no trail. But then she told us of an old slate cart road that went up the mountain behind the houses we were facing, and then you could walk to a beautiful lake behind the mountain. Since the trail went up, I figured I’d give it a try, at least for part of it.

The end result is we got quite a bit above town, but then did turn around at the end of the steep part of the slate cart road. We stood there for several minutes to admire the views in all directions, and then walked the now fairly long ways back into town, to the B and B.

Tomorrow we continue driving north, since we leave out of Scotland on Tuesday. Unless I decide I need a mini golf rematch first.