Snowdon

By shendyNo Comments
The Snowdon Mountain Railway gets booked up, so there's very little chance of being able to turn up and go. This means that you fork out your £25 (!) for the train without really knowing what the weather will be like. We passed through Llanberis on the Wednesday, a beautiful sunny day, and booked for the following day. Thursday was really nice in Llanberis, and most of the way up Snowdon. As we got about 3/4 of the way up, we found a bit of cloud - this was the view back down to the Llanberis pass. And by the time we reached the summit, we could see absolutely sod all - this is the new visitors centre from the summit. A pair of overly optimistic photographers... This is one of the trains making its way up. I did think about asking for a partial refund - not because of the weather, but because we had a diesel train, not a steam one. Still, we were lucky...
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North Wales

By shendyNo Comments
We had a few days pootling around bits of North Wales. We were based in Porthmadog, which turned out to be a really good base for getting around. Home of course to the Ffestiniog railway. This is the evening sun breaking through the clouds onto the Snowdonia hills behind Porthmadog. While much of Snowdonia is beautiful, you can't escape the industrial background of some parts. This is in Llanberis, and I think the Dinorwig hydro power station is in that hill. One of these hills is apparently Snowdon - taken from the road between Beddgelert and Llanberis. One really annoying part of Snowdonia is the lack of places to stop by the road and take photos of the views. The road down the Llanberis pass has great scenery but only about 2 places to stop. There was plenty of military jet activity. Unfortunately, by far the best view of a plane was one that appeared out of nowhere and passed very low overhead -...
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Tyntesfield

By shendyNo Comments
In lieu of a "proper" summer holiday this year, I had a couple of weeks off and we pottered about a bit. We had a week in Wales (pics to follow), but started off with a visit to Tyntesfield The National Trust have done a massive amount of restoration since they acquired the property in 2002, and the whole building is currently covered in a mass of scaffolding. Interestingly, they've built a viewing platform, so you can actually go up and see what's going on. It's fascinating to be able to look out over the roof! The garden had an excellent array of flowers in bloom, so out came the Panasonic compact camera in macro mode. I'm told they're dahlias. To me, the natural world consists of lilies, roses, tulips and "flowers". ...
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Walcot v Brixham

By shendyNo Comments
More than 10 years ago now, I took a fair few photos at Walcot RFC in Bath - a colleague was initially captain, subsequently chairman and is now secretary. The old (film!) photos are on my sports website. Anyway, I was asked to go to their first home game of the season (against Brixham) to take some photos for them to use on their website. It was a decently sunny day, which always helps the quality of the photos - it was just a shame about the result, as Brixham racked up 40 points. Walcot are in black and white, Brixham in the rather fetching pink. It's still possible to be a bit creative when taking sports photos. This is undoubtedly the shot of the day - the Walcot winger taking out his opposite number high and in the air as he went up for a high ball. It was very obvious, but amazingly the referee and touch judges all missed it - the...
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