Elan Valley

We finished off our trip to the sunny delights of North Wales by driving down through the Elan Valley - a series of dams and reservoirs built to provide water for Birmingham. SWMBO was trying to convince me that the feral sheep of the Elan Valley were meat eaters. Mind you, this one was staring at me for quite some time. This tower is apparently the point where water is extracted for Birmingham. There was a real temptation to add my own personal donation... ...
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Waterfalls

Heading back from Bodnant across Snowdonia, we stopped at a couple of waterfalls. The first was the Ogwyn Falls, at the western end of Lyn (lake) Ogwyn - we just happened to notice it from the car and stopped for a look. The second was the more well known Swallow Falls in Betws-y-coed. As there had been a reasonable amount of rain, there was quite a decent flow over the falls. ...
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Bodnant

Having said that the weather on the Friday was awful, it was in parts. Fortunately we had decided to head to the north coast, and ended up at Bodnant Gardens - the weather had cleared up as we passed (we were originally headed for Penryn Castle because some of it was indoors) so we decided to go in. And what a good decision that was - one of the best gardens I've been to. Thoroughly recommended. It's made up of several levels. At the top, there's a fairly traditional formal flower garden With more butterflies! Below that, there's a rose garden, then there's this lily pond And below that, there's *another* lily pond And then below all that, there's a path through the woods, with a stream. And a particularly photogenic waterfall. ...
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Snowdon

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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