Hello blog-checkers. Sorry for the commercial break. Life happens, and sometimes that means blog doesn’t. Since our last post, we moved, I took my exams, and we had lots of wonderful guests. I’ll update you on it as we go, but for now, I’ll start with Wales.

We went hiking in Wales over Easter weekend. One of the beautiful things about England is that the Friday before and the Monday after Easter are holidays! So, we selected our region and tentatively selected our hike, and we took the train out to Snowdonia, which is in the Northwest of Wales.

One very important point about hiking in Wales is that the Welsh call it “walking.” Now, some of the hiking Andy and I have done in the past would qualify as “walking,” and some is perhaps borderline between walking and hiking, but some of it (namely Mt. Washington), was out-and-out, through-and-through, sweaty-backed, take lots of breaks, granola bars and 4 liters of water hiking. Our hike in Wales was by far the most challenging hike – er, walk – that we have ever done.

The hike is called “The Snowdon Horseshoe.” It is supposed to take about 6 hours, is a 910 meter height gain (about 3000 ft) and an 11 km distance (just under 7 miles) to cover. Doesn’t sound as hard as Mount Washington, which is taller and farther. BUT, Mount Washington doesn’t have Crib Goch, a ridge walk that we assumed couldn’t be as scary as described in the book, and Mt. Washington has one peak. One. Like a normal mountain.

The book we bought said to approach Crib Goch on the left in order to avoid the near vertical drop on the right. When we got there, we had a moment of doubt as to whether we were on the correct side. It was pretty darn vertical, . . . but then the other side was more darn vertical, so on we went.

I went VERY slowly, so between waiting for people to pass my slow bum and waiting behind other slow people, that 6 hours I talked about turned gradually into 8 hours. The real killer about the Snowdon Horseshoe is that after Crib Goch comes the summit of Snowdon, but then you don’t get to go down the rest of the way. There are three more challenging peaks to reach before the final descent begins. It was quite a long and arduous day, but my goodness was it amazing.

We had perfect weather and gorgeous views of the surrounding lakes and mountains. We followed – and were followed by – some extremely friendly Irish folks who travel around hiking together. They were a smidge difficult to understand, but trying to understand them made for a welcomed distraction as we climbed up the tricky parts. As expert hikers, they also gave us lots of helpful hints about how to traverse difficult sections (one of the reasons we tried to stay close behind them), and even better – one of them sang an occasional Irish folk song, and we wound up the de facto audience. What a nice addition to our journey!

Along our way, we came across some mountain sheep to whom we said hello, and when we got back exhausted that night, we found our way to Pete’s Eats. Pete’s is the kind of place that sells one type of beer and eNORMous plates of exactly the food I needed – fries, baked beans, boiled eggs, burger, and I can’t even remember what else. It all (well I didn’t QUITE finish) went down wonderfully and left me to a wonderful night’s sleep.

The next day a Welsh friend of ours and his lovely lady came to meet us – we said we were up for a leisurely stroll. We found out later that a leisurely stroll with a Welshman is actually a 3-hour hike up and down some serious hills – tough on sore legs, but worth the climb for the views of the Welsh countryside.

That’s about it for Wales. Still yet to recap on Barcelona and on Katie & Steve’s visit. One day, Andy might post about his trip to China; he took a gillion great pictures. Anyway, check out our Wales pictures.

PS. A VERY VERY warm welcome to Madeleine, Fyl and Meghan’s new baby girl who shares my birthday!