Their story, in their words….
The whole experience was fascinating to say the least. Wales is beautiful and the people were abnormally nice, for example, a stranger filled up our water bottles in her home, because there were no shops or bars nearby and told us to “enjoy the Welsh water.” We stopped quite a few times to watch the animals; loads of sheep, cows, oxen, horses, ducks and goats. Pretty much all the animals that you read about in storybooks as children just happened to be up close and personal to us. As you can probably tell, we were imaginably excited to see them so close, wandering in the fields, less than a yard away from the road we were walking on.
The first day was longer than the days that followed. We headed out at 5am to the train station, and took a train to the coach station, where we took a coach to Birmingham and from Birmingham to Wales. So, we left home at 5:00AM and arrived in Wales at around 8:00PM. Rest assured, it does not take that long to get to Wales by coach, we just took a lot of precautions that led us to wait 4 hours and 15 minutes at the coach station. Those 4 hours and 15 minutes felt so long and we both struggled to stay awake and decided to take turns sleeping so we wouldn’t miss our coach. The 9-hour long coach ride (we took 2 coaches) nearly bored us to death and we were pretty much unconscious for most of the journey. By the time we arrived at Wales, we were drained (I guess too much sleep is actually bad for you). We took a bus to the campsite and prepared for the next day.
The second day was very productive. In the morning, we ate our breakfast and rushed out of the campsite so we could go out and explore. During the first few hours, we were good, it was sunny and warm, and we were beaming with eagerness. We created a rule where every turn we got to we would take a break (3 minutes), and there were hardly any turns, so it was the most effective way of getting to our destination without getting too tired. When we get to the mountain, we would take a “long break” (10- 15 minutes) and keep on walking up the mountain. The scenery was breath-taking, and we saw tons of animals and two ponies walked up to us and allowed us to stroke them. We even found an abandoned bus where we took pictures and lost our minds looking at all the buttons the drivers have to use.
We got to the edge of the mountain at around 3:00PM, taking a longer break than usual when we felt it. Then the sky darkened. We put on our waterproof jackets as It started to rain. It was light and easy at first, but it quickly became a downpour. But we stayed positive, put on our ponchos for an extra layer of protection and headed onwards. “A little bit of rain won’t kill us haha” we pretty much chanted as we continued our journey. On our way up Snowdonia the rain stopped, and we were very relieved. We continued walking on the roads up Snowdonia, standing on the right side of the road so cars could go past easily and to ensure that we were able to see the incoming cars and move away. Everything was going as planned, well that was until the rain started pouring again. This time it wasn’t just a drizzle, and not even we could jokingly call it merely “just a bit of rain”. The rain came down fast and hard and it continued to get even heavier if that was even possible. It became increasingly difficult to hike up the mountain. It was around 5pm at the time and we had already been walking up the mountain for an hour, so we decided to continue on. Then the thunderstorm hit us. We walked in the thunderstorm for about 40 mins until we decided that it was too dangerous to go any further and agreed that we should go back down.
So yes, we gave up around 6:00PM and we were super sad but decided that this trip was postponed until better weather and until one of has a car. Which we still plan to do, of course.
We got back down the mountain and found a new campsite (one that was not planned from before) around 9:00PM, tired and sad. The campsite receptionist told us that thunderstorms in mountains are the worst, and that it was great that we didn’t camp up in the mountain like we planned to do. Nevertheless, we were both crazy tired and sad; we set up our tents, took a shower, ate dinner and then passed out in our sleeping bags. It rained the whole night, the wind was freakishly cold, and the thunder continued. At that point in time we were glad we came back down.
Wednesday morning was bad. As in, we were so drained from the day before that we really struggled getting out of the warm comfort of our sleeping bags that morning. We checked the weather app and to our dismay it showed that there would be a thunderstorm the next following days we were at Wales, so we couldn’t try again without getting caught in the “little but of rain” and thunder. We decided that we should just go back to the campsite from the first night and camp there and then leave the next day. We packed up our stuff and headed back to Dina’s farm site, the first campsite. It took us a good 6- 7 hours walking to get there and it rained all day, but we laughed and joked around to chase the sadness away. We spent the rest of the night eating roasted marshmallows and noodles. At that point we had perfected our “setting up tent” skills and were very proud of ourselves. The hellish day before at that point became nothing but a distant memory. It was an unexpectedly good ending to our long journey.
We returned home safely the next day, and hopefully Snowdonia will see us again in a better weather and a bigger tent.
