Gwydir Forest

Llyn Parc and Gwydir Forest, Betws y Coed, 20/03/16

Lost in the woods..... again!

A lesson I should have learnt by now..... don't trust 'the internet', anyone could have written that stuff, for example, even I could have written it!

When Bec and me have a free day we often choose a place to visit and go off to enjoy walking in the woods, up in the hills etc. We search online for things to do and find a walking route to print out.  The last few times we've tried and tried but not managed to finish the route due to ambiguous instructions and dodgy maps and had to navigate our own way back.  I quite like the idea of getting lost and living feral in the wilderness, at least temporarily until I've run out of crisps and snack bars, but Bec might have a point when she says I wouldn't be so keen at 2am in the dark when I'm trying to build a shelter out of ferns and bracken during a rain storm.

So on Monday our supposed 3½ hour walk around Betws-y-Coed, the River Conway and Gwydir Forest took around 6½ hours on my watch, around 45 minutes of that was spent re-evaluating the start of the route!  I know what you are thinking! "you don't know what you're doing", but honestly it ain't our fault!  I challenge you to complete the walk from these instructions http://snowdonian-walking.co.uk/thellugwy.htm before it goes dark and without arguing!  See can't do it can you?!

 I have now ordered some proper walking books, with proper maps, and reliable instructions, or so say the reviews anyway.  This should mean everything goes just fine next time and Becci won't be shouting at me to "stop pissing about being silly, it's going dark and we don't know how to get back!", and I won't have to pretend I know where I'm going.  That's the theory anyway.  We'll see.....

"the ugly house is s**t"

On the way back from conquering Mount Snowdon yesterday we passed through Betws y Coed, a really very nice Welsh town/village which I recall visiting a number of times as a child.  There's two visits that stand out as particularly memorable, one getting smashed in the face with a rock and nearly losing my left eye and the other at a place called The Ugly House.

Going back 25+ years or so Mum, Dad, my bro and me were inside this old stone cottage called the ugly house that's been made into a tourist stop with gift shop etc.  Mum and Dad are chatting about boring stuff to the woman in there so Rob and me search around looking for mischief and find the visitors book.  Rob looks through other peoples comments and selectively edits in the word piss along with some small but vulgar drawings and I decide to scrawl a slightly less subtle "the ugly house is fucking shit".  We close the book and scuttle off sniggering just as the parent's conversation is tailing off.  The person in there then says "ooh right well before you go lets see what the boys were writing in the visitor book....."  uh oh!!!  me and Rob look at each other with a sense of dread although still giggling, ".....oh dear! this isn't very nice! the ugly house is effing shit???!!!"and then pages get torn out of the book while Mum and Dad sink into the floor under the weight of what must have seemed like the most embarrassing thing that has ever happening in the world to anyone ever.  It was a long, tense drive home after that.

Back to present day and I thought I should go back and put things right, you know make amends for what happened all that time ago, so firstly I thought I must go back and find their guest book..... and write the comments back in which were so harshly censored!  Unfortunately, for some reason and much to my disappointment they no longer have such a book anymore, it's been turned into a cafe now.