Days 7-9: Wales, Wales, Wales
Day 7- Up and at 'em bright and early for the longest drive of the trip. Breakfast at Wellington Hotel and one quick little five minute walk around Boscastle just to finish soaking up the Cornish atmosphere, then it was off on the road to Wales.
Our big stop for the day was Caerphilly Castle. Got lunch at a pub that overlooked the castle once we all arrived in the town. Then explored the castle for a while. The kids loved it, there's a dragon lair with some big dragon sculptures that look pretty realistic, and a recorded story about them that plays automatically. There was also a maze to walk through, though I think the kids enjoyed just running around the castle grounds and up and down stairs exploring all the nooks and crannies of the castle. It's a gorgeous castle that is a little bit crumbling from the English Civil War but overall remarkably intact (we learned from a little movie presentation there that it is now intact due to a civil works project during the Depression to give people jobs rebuilding the castle when there were no other jobs to be had). Totally loved that castle experience.
We continued on our drive up to Hay-on-Wye. We stayed at a farmhouse B&B just a few minutes down the road from the town, but given Hay's proximity to the Welsh/English border, we technically stayed the night just over the border in England. Got dinner at the Three Tuns in Hay, which turned out to be a lovely ancient building, and it could easily accommodate our big group in the pub area, and it had good food. As an aside, I feel like this trip I ate much better (both in taste and in general healthiness) this time than in previous UK trips. Even pub food had some great healthy options, I am now a total convert to a baked sweet potato with avocado and pico de gallo as a meal. After dinner we turned in to our B&B, which was not quite the idyll I had imagined when we booked. It was swarmed with wasps, super hot, and we couldn't open the skylight (the only window in the bedroom) because it was pouring buckets of rain all night. The owner of the B&B was not at all on our wavelength. Wouldn't stay there again, but hey, they can't all be winners.
Day 8- After a breakfast that was soundtracked by extremely loud cow noises from the neighboring farm (neighboring quite literally exactly next to the barn conversion we slept in), we went into Hay-on-Wye to wander around book shopping for a few hours. Hay-on-Wye is known as the "town of books" and has tons of used bookstores, it's remarkably charming and was a lovely experience. We got lunch at a nice little cafe next to the car park, then got into our cars to continue our journey.
Drove a couple of hours north into the very southern edge of Snowdonia National Park. We went to an attraction called King Arthur's Labyrinth, which, again, is another place that immediately captured my attention when I saw a video about it a year or so ago. It involves going down into an old slate mine that has been converted into a fun kids attraction. We took a little boat ride deep into the cave, then got out to walk through some caves that had been set up dioramas and recorded stories about various Arthurian / Glendower legends. The piece de resistance is an animatronic dragon that roars at you from above as you leave the caves. The kids loved it. It was pouring rain when we left the attraction, so we ran for our cars to continue driving a little bit further up into Snowdonia to get to our hotel for the night.
We stayed at Plas Dolmelynllyn Hotel, a spectacular old Tudor pile in the woods in the middle of nowhere. The guy working the check in desk was straight out of Scooby Doo casting, and it felt vaguely creepy when it seemed like we might be the only guests at the hotel that night, and it was raining, and it was all very atmospheric. It turned out that there were other guests staying at the hotel, and the whole place was actually quite welcoming and relaxing, with not even a ghost story to be found (I asked the guy at the check out desk in the morning, who I think may have been the owner of the hotel, and he claimed there were never any ghost stories at all about the place). The boys had an absolute blast running around the hotel from room to room, and taking over the lounge. We all trooped into Dollgeau, the nearest town down the road, for dinner, but were denied at every opportune seeming pub/restaurant. It was a Friday night, and we were much too big a group for any one place to accommodate. The night was saved by discovering a pizza place from which we could order take out, so we got some pizzas, left Drew and A in town to watch the first Liverpool game of the season at a pub, and we brought pizzas back to the hotel for the most low-key and relaxing dinner of the trip. It was awesome. The kids cavorted for a few more hours, we adults lounged around in the lounge, and later T and I went out to retrieve Drew and A from town after the game. A very successful day/evening!
Day 9- It was still raining buckets, and we worried that our train ride up Mount Snowden might be cancelled, but luckily it was still running, just only halfway up the mountain instead of to the summit. We trundled ourselves up through Snowdonia through some extremely beautiful scenery, stopped for some vista viewing a few times along the way. Got to the Snowden Mountain Railway and took a really nice (despite the weather) train ride up the mountain. We were super glad the train was still running, it was an amazing experience and totally worth it even in the rain.
After the train we had just enough time and energy to drive for 15 minutes over to Cearnarfon Castle to wander around that majestic castle for a little while. It was raining on and off, so we spend most of the time there in the military museum they had taking up part of the castle, because at least it was dry there. The kids spent some time listening to a story teller reading a story about a kid and a dragon. That was about it for that castle, we didn't stay super long, but it was long enough to get a sense of the place. Headed further up the road to our destination for our last night as a big group- Llandudno. It's a Victorian seaside resort town, which I think was more charming in Victorian times. It's kind of run-down now, and it's mostly just hotels and restaurants. I would not venture back there again, but it was an interesting contrast to the other places we stayed. We were originally all going to stay at The Llandudno Hotel, but several of us got cold feet about the hotel over the months after we booked it, because the reviews were absolutely atrocious. We booked alternate rooms at a Travelodge, and after seeing both hotels, we were very glad we did so. The first hotel was terrible, and I got into a fight with the owner because he refused to let us officially check out after we had checked in. Had dinner at a Mediterranean restaurant that had a long screed about the behavior of children on the front of its menu, but it was a good proper send off for our big group on our last night together.