Sheep

Until the age of 11, I grew up in England, which meant I grew up with sheep in my life. By that, I don't mean like we had a flock of sheep in our back garden or anything (we didn't!), but sheep were out there. Somewhere. Somewhere close. Not that far away. If we took a drive to see my grandparents or went for a walk somewhere or even went on a family holiday (all too often to Wales in my grandma and grandpa's caravan), we were bound to find some sheep somewhere. You can't grow up English and not have sheep in your life.

Then we moved to the United States. All of a sudden...no sheep. Like none. Nowhere. Like lamb to eat was not a thing. No fluffy white animals baa-ing in the fields. No lambs gamboling in spring. Cows? Sure? Lots and lots and lots of cows and their chewing and their methane. But sheep? Nowhere to be found. Not a one. 

That lack of sheep here in America sticks with me. So much so that when I go to Great Britain and leave a city, the first thing I do when I see sheep is turn to whomever I am traveling with (newsflash: it's my wife) and say "sheep!" (although admittedly, sometimes it's "sheeps" or "sheepies"...). It's a thing. Sheep = Britain = home. What can I say? And this year, on my first trip to Wales since I was a kid younger than 11 years old, when I saw my first sheep in Wales, I am sure I exclaimed "sheep!" or my wife said the same thing to me. 

Or it might have been "sheeps" or "sheepies". 

Sheep on Mount Snowdon.

We expected that we would see a lot of sheep in Wales. And we were correct. There were sheep seemingly everywhere. In the fields. On the mountains. Around corners. Close. In the distance. Sometimes on the side of the road. Sometimes in the middle of the road. We figured maybe it would be worth spending a little time in Wales getting a little bit up close to some sheep and some sheep history.

Sheep history? Bear with me a little bit.

Invariably when we travel, we dig a little bit or a lot bit into the local history of the place where we are exploring. Wales was no exception to that rule. When we started to piece together some sites to explore Welsh history, we kept running into the Industrial Revolution. 

Why the Industrial Revolution? Well, because there was a lot of industry in Wales that was at the epicenter of the transition away from an agrarian economy and into manufacturing, that's why. And with industry to remove those natural resources from the land, you also need an infrastructure to transport those materials to points of sale. 

One of the first things that got inked into our agenda was a visit to the Pontcysysllte Aqueduct near Llangollen. We booked our passage over Thomas Telford's masterpiece of civil engineering early and it paid off with an amazing day puttering along in a narrow boat through part of the United Kingdom's vast canal network. 

Then we explored visiting a coal mine but we kind of did that in 2014 when we paid a visit to an old coal mine in Yorkshire (and then sort of repeated it with a tin mine visit in Cornwall just two years ago). We looked at slate as a source of inspiration and found that the National Slate Museum was closed for renovation. Bummer! 

So we decided to double down on sheep. Or wool. And if you are thinking that wool does not have any part in the Industrial Revolution, you'd be way wrong. 

Now, there was a time when wool production in Great Britain looked a lot like the photograph above. Individual men and women with spinning wheels in their houses taking wool that had been cleaned and straightened by hand and then made into thread and spun onto bobbins all over the land. And yes, I did ask if it was OK for me to take a photograph but clearly the woman on the left is the only one who was interested enough to pose and smile. We'll come back to these ladies later.

I know what you are thinking...where on Earth did we find a group of women sitting around using spinning wheels? Well...the National Wool Museum, where else? 

We journeyed through a lot of back roads and even more back, back roads that were one to one and half cars wide in our week plus in Wales. It took a lot of those sorts of roads to get to the National Wool Museum in Dre-fach Felindre. Don't know where that is in Wales? Neither did we. Apparently it's near Newcastle Emlyn Llandysul. Don't know where that is in Wales? Neither did we and neither do we still. But Google Maps knows. And despite a lot of very tight roads, we made it just in time for opening time at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. 

It was packed. I'm not kidding. The parking lot was at least half full. In the morning in the middle of nowhere. I told you wool was a big deal.

The National Wool Museum is housed in a pair of old textile mill buildings that used to be the Cambrian Mills. Industrialization makes a lot more sense, now, right? Mills I can get behind as a concept. They must have been chock full of looms making blankets or some other kind of large scale textile products, right? 

And yes, that is what happened at the old Cambrian Mills, but it's not all that happened. 

We started our tour of the Wool Museum by chatting to the four ladies above, then we moved past a quick history of sheep and wool and then walked into the first floor of one of the mills and found the willower and the carding engine. What's a willower, you might ask? It's a machine that disentangles wool. Pretty simple, right? 

No. No, it is not. This machine is massive. I'd guess (and I'm going from memory a bit here), it is about five to six feet wide and maybe 15 feet long. It's absolutely enormous. It's as complicated as a bunch of rollers with teeth through which cleaned wool is fed into from a large hopper of sorts. This machine is gigantic. And all it does is disentangle wool that people used to have to do by hand.

So what's a carding engine then? It's a machine that combs the wool after it's been willowed and gets it ready for spinning. It effectively converts wool fibers into almost wool thread. How big is this machine? Slightly bigger than the willower. Put these two machines end to end and it's about 30 to 35 feet long. All these two things do is take cleaned wool and make it into thread. Almost. They occupied an entire length of a giant mill building.

Industrial Revolution? Wool? Yes. Very much so.

The carding engine (top) and the spinning mule (bottom).

The machinery didn't stop there.There is a spinning mule on the second floor of the mill, a machine that basically takes the thread out of the carding engine and puts it onto bobbins. This machine is the one that killed spinning as a cottage industry in England and Wales and other parts of the world where that sort of thing went on. If you had one of these things, you no longer needed to pay women and men to do this at home. It was cheaper and faster to have a machine do it. That's amazing that you can buy this giant machine which you have to maintain and operate and that it pays off over time. I'm sure that return on investment was quick. Don't mess with the power of machinery.

After the spinning mule? Some looms and some machines to dry and finish the final products woven on the looms. The scale and size of the machines in the Museum is staggering. I can't imagine how revolutionary these would have seemed to people back in the 18th century when some of these contraptions were rolled out. We think we are scared by Artificial Intelligence today? Try seeing one of these giants for the first time. It must have been astounding.

Some of these things are absolutely gorgeous, by the way. These are old school machines. Large mechanisms made up of giant pieces of iron that move and interlock and work together precisely to make what once seemed impossible into very real possibilities. I cannot imagine the noise and the heat coming off these machines. We were told they were originally coal-fueled and steam-powered, although there is an operational water wheel outside one of the two mill buildings. I am sure at some point water was used as some sort of power for the whole process.

Mills, with an abundance of natural materials from all the sheep in the country, proliferated in Wales. In the late 1800s there were 23 mills in the area around Dre-fach Felindre alone. If we thought this was in the middle of nowhere today, I can't imagine how it would have been 140 or so years ago. There must have been mills and nothing else. And it must have been noisy and dirty.

The absolutely gorgeous teasel gig (top) and the old water wheel (bottom).

Wool comes from sheep, right? 

Not a trick question. It does come from sheep.

Earlier in this post I wrote that we doubled down on sheep and then all I've done since that sentence is write about the National Wool Museum. But we did do something else sheep-related before we went to the Wool Museum. And it wasn't about history or learning or the Industrial Revolution. It was about chilling with some sheep for a bit.

What exactly does that mean? We took a sheep for a walk. That's what that means.

Say hi to Biscuit. She's a nine year old Ouessant sheep, which apparently is pretty old for a Ouessant. Ouessants are often called Breton dwarfs; they are the smallest naturally-occurring breed of sheep in the entire world and they originated (maybe not surprisingly given their alternate moniker) in Brittany, France. On an island name Ouessant, if you must know. They tend to top out at about 19 or 20 inches tall. That's a pretty small sheep.

We didn't meet Biscuit in Brittany. We met Biscuit in Wales in a town called Crai, which is somewhere in the vicinity of the Brecon Beacons National Park. And if you thought the National Wool Museum was in the middle of nowhere, Dre-fach Felindre has nothing on Crai. It took us the better part of 3-1/2 to 4 hours to get there from Llandudno. Not a quick trip. 

Biscuit lives on the Aberhyddnant Organic Farm in Crai along with a number of other sheep of various species. Pretty much all of those other sheep, including some April born lambs, are bigger than Biscuit. We were there to walk one of the sheep on the farm for about 45 minutes to an hour. 

And no, I'm not kidding. We went to the middle of nowhere to walk a sheep. So did six other people who we'd never met before. Sheep trekking is a thing in Wales, I guess.

Introduction to the flock (top) and those sheep not eligible for selection on the move (bottom).

First activity? Sheep selection. Socks. Fluffy. Patches. Jacob. Benji. And of course Biscuit. Maybe there was a Bo in there. Some others that I can't remember. I picked Biscuit because she was absolutely the smallest adult sheep I had ever seen in my life and I figured if there was any chance of a sheep bolting or getting out of control under my care, better that I have a 35 pound or so sheep to deal with than something larger. 

Rookie sheep walker. What can I say? 

Next up? Rules of the road. Keep the lead (that's leash in American) on the same side of the sheep's head as you are standing; if you lose control of your sheep, it will go find other sheep to be with and chasing it won't make things any better; and sheep have absolutely no spatial awareness so beware those horns because they don't register as being there to a sheep. 

Biscuit had no horns. I'm good with that last rule. Or so I thought. 

What comes next? Take your sheep by the lead and let's go! Walking time!

Let's go, Biscuit!

If this isn't one of the silliest and most self-indulgent things I have ever done in my life, I don't know what beats it. I mean, we drove almost 4 hours to get to a farm and paid someone to let me walk one of their sheep for an hour (to clarify...Sophia also had her own sheep). But when am I ever going to have the opportunity to do this again? And why NOT do this? There's no answer to that last question by the way because there is no acceptable answer. This was a can't miss experience. 

What's it like walking a sheep? It's pretty relaxing. There's absolutely no stress involved in leading a fluffy sheep around through fields both empty of other sheep and full of other sheep. It's actually kind of peaceful. If the sheep want to walk, let them walk. If the sheep want to eat, let them eat. If they just decide to stand still, you can generally get them going with a tug of the lead. They are very inclined to be led. They are, after all, sheep. 

Biscuit, by the way, is all sheep. And by that I mean a natural born follower. I was told at the beginning of our sheep trek that Biscuit is pretty docile and that she is happy just following a "big white bottom" (not my words). That description of Biscuit is spot on. Give her a couple of other sheep to follow and she's all in! She's motoring as fast as those little Breton legs can carry her. Third or fourth or even second in a pack and she's off! 

But get to the front of the pack and she stopped dead in her tracks. Not interested in being out front in any way. Not Biscuit. Not this tiny sheep.

Biscuit following other sheep.

She's also a talker and not much of an eater. All of the other sheep seemed to be stopping regularly to munch of some leaves. Biscuit? Not interested. She was all about the walk except for one spot where she did actually stop for a snack until like three or four other larger (because ALL sheep are larger than Biscuit) piled over and on top of her and pushed her aside to get to whatever she had found to eat. Poor Biscuit.

This is the point in the walk when sheep having no spatial awareness kicked in for me. In the process of knocking my sheep out of the way, one sheep also managed to get his or her horns into my waist area on the way to the greenery. "I have horns? Didn't notice. Needed a bite to eat. If my horns get in the way, who cares." Yes, that's my made up dialog from the sheep that horned me.

But when it came to voice and volume, Biscuit was the champ. She was making way more noise than any of the other sheep which also endeared her to me. We managed to get a video of her looking over to her left before she turned towards the camera, let out a giant "baaaa" and then turned back away, her cameo for the camera done for the day.

Yes, I got attached to a sheep in Wales. I'm telling you...I got the best one.

Larger sheep moving Biscuit (center) out of the way.

It is amazing to think that at one time, sheep like Biscuit were part of a giant economic engine that drove trade between countries and caused men to invent huge contraptions to maximize the return on the power of their precious natural resources that just happened to have four feet. Before sheep were domesticated and wool was sourced and converted to thread, mankind relied on plants and skins for clothing, I guess. Imagine having a predictable product that could be reliable made into intentional garments when you had no such option before. It must have been revolutionary.

I did have one question about this whole thing though: what did sheep do with all this wool before humans were around? Did it just grow and grow and grow because there were no men and women with shears around to cut it off? 

The answer from the farm? Apparently sheep were bred over time to produce the maximum amount of wool, which of course required frequent shearings from humans. 

What does the Wool Museum think about that? Pretty accurate, I guess. The Wool Museum did acknowledge that breeding is a factor in how modern sheep produce wool. But it also mentioned that before sheep were domesticated (that would be more than 5,000 years ago in Wales), sheep would shed their wool in the summer. Makes sense. I mean we sort of saw the same thing happening to wild bighorn sheep in Rocky Mountain National Park six years ago.

Sheep? Industrial Revolution? Yes, it's a thing.

Two last wool thoughts. 

First, if it wasn't obvious already, I loved the National Wool Museum. The place completely fascinated me and it started before I even set foot inside the old Cambrian Mills. Outside the Museum, there's a natural dye garden. Who knew that the roots of the madder plant were used to dye wool red? Certainly not me, who had never even heard of a madder plant.

Second and lastly, the woman on the left spinning and smiling at us and who was so gracious to walk us through a lot of the mechanics of using a spinning wheel? She was spinning thread from the very same farm where Biscuit lives. Connections. I'm telling you. The things we connect to each other when we travel.

You know the next time I'm in England or Wales and I see sheep, I'm saying "sheeps!". It just has way more meaning now.

Canal Boat Diaries

One thing that becomes completely obvious when you travel a lot or even a little is that all travel days are not created equal. Some days you just look forward to way more than others. Sometimes those days pan out really well and sometimes (and regrettably) they disappoint. This post is about one of those most anticipated days. And it did not disappoint.

The photograph above is a ground-level view of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct crossing the River Dee in the town of Trevor in Wales. It is the longest aqueduct in Great Britain and the tallest canal aqueduct in the world. It was designed in the late 18th century by Thomas Telford and was completed and opened in 1805. It is still in use today. Telford, one of several world famous civil engineers active in the 1800s along with fellow Britons Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson, knew what he was doing.

The aqueduct was designed to be navigable by narrowboats, a type of barge particular to the island of Great Britain which are generally less than 7 feet wide and less than 75 feet long, although in some cases they are significantly shorter than the 75 feet maximum. The use of narrowboats and canals in Britain began in earnest at around the time of the Industrial Revolution to transport goods to and from mills and factories and mines. That network of canals constructed in Britain to move all those goods around, into and out of the country is still there today and is still very, very active, even if its original purpose is (mostly) long gone.

Over the time that I've been writing this blog, we've visited other significant works of civil engineering in Britain, including the Tower Bridge and the Thames Barrier in London and the Firth of Forth Bridge and the Falkirk Wheel in Scotland. The Pontsysyllte Aqueduct is located less than an hour and 15 minutes from our hotel in Llandudno where we were spending our first three nights in Wales. We could not pass up the opportunity to visit this icon of British engineering.

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in the Welsh landscape. 

You don't need to do much in the way of anything special outside of having a car to get to the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct. You can drive right up to this marvel of stone and cast iron. You can even walk across it on the walkway that is adjacent the waterway which makes up the oh-so-impressive full 12 feet width of this structure. It's a piece of cake to get a super detailed, up close experience here.

We didn't do that. 

Yes, we wanted to see the Aqueduct from both below and above but we didn't want to just drive up to it and walk across. We wanted to cross the full span in a narrow boat high above the Dee River. I mean, after all, this is what the Aqueduct was really and originally built to support. Let's be legit about this experience and go over it in a boat. And there are companies in the area around the town of Trevor which offer round trip boat rides over the Aqueduct and it only takes a couple of hours.

We didn't do that either. 

What's better than booking a spot on a narrow boat to cross the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct? How about having a 32 foot long boat all for your party and nobody else? Private boat for the day so we could take the trip at our own leisure and schedule with nobody else to worry about? Sounded ideal. THAT is what we wanted to do as soon as we found out about it. Boat for the day? Rented!

Then we went one better over that situation. These boats hold a maximum of ten people. We had the whole boat. Why not bring some other folks along. So we got my cousin and her husband to come down from Manchester and my uncle and aunt to come over from Yorkshire and we made a day of it. It is rare that I get to spend time actually doing something with my relatives from over the other side of the Atlantic Ocean so this day was poised to be amazing. Pontcysyllte Aqueduct in a boat? That was our original plan. Doing it as a private excursion with family? How does it get any better?

By the way, I have no idea how to pronounce Pontcysyllte. No clue. Forgot to ask.

Our chariot for the day, the Dydd Un, which means Day One.

So the boat comes with a driver, right? 

Nope. You can hire a driver for the day but you don't have to. They allow you to drive it yourself. So even though I'd never driven a narrow boat before, I figured if they allow you to do it, it must be perfectly safe, right? I mean they can't really let people drive a boat down a canal if there are repeated issues with first time drivers causing havoc every day, right? Right? Made perfect sense to me.

We got a lesson with our day boat hire from Steve. 

Boat operation instruction? Pretty simple. This is not a complicated machine. You need a key to turn on the boat. Motor starts with the push of a button. Engine goes forward and in reverse. It's an opposite steer craft meaning if you want to go right, push the tiller to the left and do the opposite to go left. There's a lock key included in the boat and if you need to stop for lunch, there are large metal pins that you can drive into the ground with a hammer and ropes to tie the boat to the pins.

Canal navigation instructions? A bit more complicated but not super difficult. Right after we start our journey, there's a one way part to the canal lasting about 500 meters; one person needs to get out of the boat and confirm there's no other boat coming the other way. After that there's a farmer's bridge that will most assuredly be up; but if it's not, you'll need to use the lock key to crank it up. After that, there's another very narrow section of the canal but nowhere near as long as the first section. The Aqueduct is one way and there's a wide spot to turn around after that.

And in case you were wondering...no locks. In fact, the rental agreement prohibits entering locks. Also, no legging required, as confirmed by my Uncle Malcolm.

Steve giving us the pre-departure rundown of the rules of the water.

First task? Turn the boat around. Steve would help us with that. 

Canals are narrow. Narrower than the 75 foot maximum length of a narrow boat (that length is limited by the typical length of a lock; no point having a narrow boat that won't pass through locks) and even narrower than the 32 foot length of our boat (the Dydd Un) carrying us around for the day. So to turn the boat around, we'd need to find a spot where the canal is a bit wider. Fortunately, there are such spots and there was one just a bit further from the Aqueduct than where we boarded our boat for the day.

Turning around? Piece of cake. We came back to the place where we boarded, Steve got off and we were on our own for the rest of the day. Our task for the day would be to motor the boat down to and over the Aqueduct, turn it around, find some lunch and get back before 5 pm. We'd have about seven hours to do all that. Seemed like plenty of time.

And the day couldn't have been better. We always keep a close eye on the weather for rain whenever we are in the United Kingdom and we'd been tracking the possibility of rain in the days leading up to our trip on the water. Sometimes the forecast looked like rain and sometimes it didn't. When we got the actual day, it was gorgeous sunshine the whole day. 

Scenes from the trip to the Aqueduct. This is pretty much idyllic English landscape stuff, no?

You know what? Driving a narrow boat down a straight narrow canal isn't really that difficult. There's no turning required so steering is minimal at best. You don't have to worry about the ducks and ducklings because they will get themselves out of the way. And there's not really that much other traffic on the canal. On this last point, we were probably helped out a bit to a lot by a breach in the canal system to the west a few months earlier that effectively cut off our portion of the canal from the rest of the nation. So no boats coming for the weekend.

There was no boat coming the other way on the 500 meter very narrow section of the canal (yes, we had somebody get out and walk to check), the farmer's bridge was indeed up and we found a similar lack of other way traffic on the second narrow section of the canal. Also, hitting the side of the canal seems to be acceptable; we did it with Steve in the boat and he seemed to think that was normal. And our rate of travel is slower than walking speed.

Got that? Slower than walking speed. When I got out of the boat to check the one way canal section on the way back, I could easily outpace the speed of the Dydd Un.

If there was an initial trickiness about the beginning part of our journey, it was navigating around one or two of the 8,500 narrow boats in the country registered as permanent homes. It is very, very important not to disturb these boats. I can't imagine being asleep in one of these things and having some first-time day driver slam into your boat / house accidentally. NOT how I'd want to wake up. Or wake someone up.

The solution? Slow down to minimize any sort of wake and be careful. As narrow as these canals are, there is easily enough space in an average section of canal to move past another seven foot wide narrow boat with ease.

At the helm (top) and scattering ducklings along the way (bottom).

A couple hours after departure, we got to the Aqueduct. This is what we came to see and it had to be without a doubt the best part of the ride. It was, by the way. Crossing the Aqueduct was incredible.

So first of all, this structure is crazy. And heads up, I'm going to use that word over and over in this section of the post. It is just a touch more than 1,000 feet long and almost 12 feet wide (actually 11'-10" and yes I rounded up earlier in this post to 12 feet). It is basically a cast iron trough with those dimensions supported about 125 feet above the Dee River valley by a series of iron arches spanning between 20 hollow stone masonry piers. From the ground it is simple and elegant.

The crazy part about the whole crossing experience is when you are driving a narrow boat across it and it's all about that 11'-10" dimension and the drop. I don't know how exactly the dimensions of the Aqueduct work out precisely but a narrow boat is about seven feet wide and a walk where folks need to pass each other and have a railing also installed (you know...safety) is going to take a good let's say 3-1/2 feet. Considering the walls of the trough which carries the water are probably 3 inches thick (I'm guessing...I didn't measure but I got awfully close to what I would have wanted to measure), that's not a lot of space on either side of the boat. 

And that's true. Our narrow boat was basically hitting the sides of the trough carrying the water with a 125 foot or so drop on the other side of it. So the boat that we are driving is basically banging into a very thin piece of cast iron over and over again and if it breaks because we keep hitting it then that's not good news. Now, deep down inside, I knew it wasn't going to break. People have been knocking their boats against this piece of cast iron for 200 plus years. Still...it makes you wonder.

This fear is escalated a bit by the view down when you are on the right side of the boat going out and the left side of the boat coming back. Whereas on the footpath side of the Aqueduct, there's a nice comfortably high railing for pedestrians, on the canal side of the structure, there's nothing. It's a thinnish piece of cast iron which is about as high as it needs to be to hold the water (the top of the cast iron is actually below the floor of the rear deck of the boat) and nothing else. No rail, no guard, no nothing. Lean over the side of the boat and look over the edge (which is way possible because you are traveling basically on the very edge of the structure) and it's straight down. It's pretty thrilling. And it's also crazy. This was a once in a lifetime journey. When else am I ever going to do something like this?

I'm posting three pictures of the transit over the Aqueduct below. Check out how close to the edge of the structure our boat is. And it's not like we had much opportunity to be further away. The second picture is a view taken by me extending my arm over the side of the boat and snapping a pic with my phone. Crazy view! But also a great picture of the bolts on the cast iron arches.

So then we had to get back for 5 pm. Which was not really a problem other than mooring the boat twice to spend time at two pubs for lunch (the first wouldn't serve us lunch), the speed that these boats travel at and the canoeists. Of all the dangers we faced on our day on the canal system of Great Britain, people in canoes turned out to be the biggest danger of all. This could have been bad. It wasn't but we (meaning I) sure had some luck on my side a bit.

The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct is a one way passage. Perhaps that was obvious by my description of the canal being barely wider than the boat above. The way traffic works is that if someone is coming across the Aqueduct, traffic has to wait for all boats, whether narrow boats or other types of craft (like canoes), to cross completely before traffic can go the other direction. And the rule is basically if you get to the Aqueduct and you see someone ahead of you going across, follow them, no matter how far ahead they are. This could make for quite a wait under the wrong circumstances.

We got lucky on both our journey across and back. We followed boats both ways and didn't have to wait. On the way back, we followed a canoe. And like us being first time narrow boat drivers, this dude and his (I'm guessing here...) six year old daughter were clearly first time canoeists. Slow doesn't begin to describe the speed of the crossing here and the swiftness of his passage was made worse by the fact that he kept stopping so his wife (on foot) could take pictures of him.

We finally get across and find a whole line of others waiting to go back the other way and we figure we could pass this dude at a slightly higher speed and keep going on our journey. But he could not maneuver his canoe out of way. He kept being almost clear before zigging back into the way. Eventually, we (again, meaning I) ran out of room and hit the wall of the canal head on. He wasn't ultimately in my way at that specific point in time but those clear directions about steering and reversing at the beginning of the day...not working so well in a panic situation where you are trying to avoid crushing a canoe with a child and her father inside. I'm sure it was not as close as I felt it was. He did, ultimately, let us pass after my cousin's husband asked him to let us pass. 

Was the height of the Aqueduct scary? Not to me it wasn't. But canoeists? Yes. Very scary. As my uncle Malcolm put it (and I'm paraphrasing) "that guy thinking everyone else on the water knows exactly what they are doing is probably a poor assumption."

Canoeists...following on over the Aqueduct and passing others packed to the side of the canal.

We did make it back on time. Barely. But two minutes or so before 5 pm is still on time. I think the speed threw us off a bit. 

Before we boarded the Dydd Un in Llangollen Wharf for our day boat ride, we found a few episodes of a British show called Canal Boat Diaries on YouTube. It's a show hosted by dedicated narrow boat owner and dweller Robbie Cumming who takes his narrow boat all over the United Kingdom in search of local sights. My mother thinks the show is boring and while some of it is definitely on the banal side, I am fascinated by this show. I mean, here's Robbie living the dream of being one with his narrow boat which can take him pretty much anywhere he wants to go in the entire country. Everything he needs is on this 7 foot by 75 foot craft. I love it.

I can confidently say that after spending a day on a narrow boat (admittedly just 32 feet long) that I am not cut out for living for any stretch of time on this type of watercraft. I love the day we spent on the Dydd Un crossing a 200 year old aqueduct with family that I rarely get to spend time with but my personal canal boat diaries probably stop in the end of May 2026. And I'm sure my wife is happy to know that. 

I can also confidently say that this day would have been nowhere near as much fun as it was if we were to have done this as a couple. It would have honestly been all work, all day. Having a crew including an able helmsman (thanks, Louis!) to take charge of the steering for most of the day was a huge relief. 

One day on a canal is probably enough. We made it about as amazing as it could be with the location and the company. Pontcysyllte? Sorted!

The crew of the Dydd Un. At least for one day in late May 2026 anyway.

58

Today is my 58th birthday. I'm still here. I'm still traveling. I'm still blogging. And I'm still thankful for all that. I feel like I'm slowing down physically and I'm waaaay too fat but everytime I get away and get more active than I am at my desk-bound day job, I feel younger and rejuventated. That must be a sign, right? That I need to spend more time on the road? I'm thinking yes.

I need to work on the fatness thing. That's my issue to work like imminently.

My 58th year around the sun had us on four trips, three of which were at least a week long, with a couple of New York City weekends sprinkled in here and there and a bonus almost weeklong remote work week in New Orleans. I swear one day we'll make it to New York for more than just a weekend or long weekend with an extended stay in that city that we love so much. Last Labor Day we made it a theater weekend with four shows in three days. Give me more time in New York for more shows, Broadway or otherwise. Soon, I hope.

What blew me away this year? Honestly, like everything. Not every minute of every trip that we took but there was something astonishing, exciting, fascinating, delicious, eye-opening or just totally brand new on every vacation we took. It's actually pretty stunning that travel can do that for me (in addition to the feeling younger and rejuvenating thing). I cannot believe how gorgeous the Canadian Rocky Mountains are. I could have spent weeks there. That trip was a whim that got fleshed out pretty quickly and turned into a reality that was well worth it. I want to go back to those mountains and to the Stampede.

I also can't believe that I took my fourth safari trip in the last year (this one to South Africa) and that I actually found something in nine days in Wales that ended up far, far better than my childhood memories that were preventing me from agreeing to go back to that part of Great Britain. This year, I've watched lions and elephants and all sort of other creatures on safari and walked with sheep and spent a day on a remote islands with an enormous quantity of puffins and a few other species of birds. It's crazy the sort of stuff we can get up to when we find ourselves deliberately moving away from home for a spell.

And that Antelope Canyon in Arizona was pretty darned satisfying too.

The only real mistake I think we made this year was scheduling no travel (short of a weekend in NYC) in the 4-1/2 months between early November and late March. Why do I continue to have three plus long stretches of calendar time with no traveling? I'll try to do better.

Horseshoe Bend, Colorado River, Arizona.

Two years ago on this date, I swore off travel goals. That was after year 11 of this blog when I finally finished what I committed to at the beginning of year five (I had until the end of year 10 to complete those...). Today, I'm reaffirming that swearing off. I'm not saying that there will never be travel goals ever again but there won't be any until at least my 59th birthday. Maybe I'll make it an even 60. I do feel the pull of South America. I might need to scratch that itch soon. I'm just not sure it's going to be a goal. And not sure that's getting scratched in the next 12 months.

I'm super excited about the next year of travel. Finishing out 2026 are two North American (and non-U.S.) trips I've longed to take for a while. One north and one south. Polar bears and beluga whales and cemetery visits and the food of my spiritual homeland. Finally being able to knock those off an ever-changing list of things that I'm craving to experience is going to be amazing. These trips are going to be a bit of a splurge, a reward for the two of us making each other stay at work and earning money for a little while longer.

Anything after that? Well, sure, I mean what else are we supposed to do. I'm thinking two re-run trips to warmer places in the southern half of the United States and a long deserved trip back to continental Europe (after 3-1/2 years away). There's sort of an idea or two in there but it's sort  of definitely going to happen. 

So when do we get back on the road? Well, we just got back so let's give it at least a month or so. And no three plus month long stays at home. Not this year. No sir! 

Kruger National Park, South Africa. This is exactly what safari is like. LOVE this pic.

Snowdon

Ask any kid raised in England in the 1970s what the tallest mountain in England and Wales is and I guarantee you 90% or more of them know it's Mount Snowdon in Wales. Guaranteed. 

We planned to spend nine nights in Wales and our first stop was the seaside town of Llandudno, which is located about 30 miles or so from Snowdon. We had to get to the top of this mountain on one of our eight full days in Wales. Had to. I mean how many times in your life do you get the opportunity to travel to the top of the highest peak in a country? 

Those first two paragraphs are loaded with rabbit holes and I'm going to venture down a couple of those right away. 

First, there are some strange things I remember from my childhood education in England and highest mountains in Britain is one of those (I discussed this same issue a few years ago on this blog about the year 1066...). The highest mountain in Britain is Ben Nevis in Scotland. Every '70s English kid should know that information. In fact, the highest 22 mountains in Britain are in Scotland (I did NOT know that as a kid). But as if to not let Scotland be the best at anything, my teachers drilled into our heads the highest mountain in Britain AND the highest mountain in England / Wales. There's where Snowdon becomes a household name.

Second, a mountain in Britain is not like a mountain in most other countries. Climbing the highest mountain in the the United States means expedition-ing up Denali to a height of 20,310 feet. Mont Blanc in France is 15,766 feet and you'd need some similarly professional gear and guidance. Same for Kilimanjaro, Everest, and any country in the Alps, Andes and other large ranges. Mount Snowdon? 3,560 feet. It's a hill. It's about a third of the height of Haleakala in Hawaii and you can drive up to top of that mountain. Snowdon? Mountain? Barely. This should be a piece of cake.

One last thing before we get to the meat of this post. I don't remember any teacher in school ever making us memorize the tallest mountain in England. I haven't looked it up and I have no idea what it is. I find that strange, assuming my memory is correct. 

Time to climb Mount Snowdon.

The path to Snowdon's summit.

The walk up and down Mount Snowdon takes pretty much all day. We knew this before we arrived in Wales because my cousin (who has made the hike) told us. We are no strangers to long walks while on holiday. Over the last 13 years, we'd done some pretty epic hikes. Delicate Arch in Utah. Machu Picchu in Peru. Gorilla trekking in Uganda. Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto. A couple of others maybe. We can get some steps in while we are traveling the globe.

So how does the hike up Mount Snowdon compare to those other walks we have taken on other continents? Honestly...I have no idea. We didn't walk up Snowdon. Or down for that matter. We don't see everything that CAN be walked up or to or around as a MUST walk up or to or around. And we just had too darned much to do on Snowdon day to spend the whole day walking. So we didn't hike it.

But we did make it to the peak. Only we took the train most of the way there. We did walk to the peak itself, like the last 50 to 100 feet or so.

Our chariot to the peak.

I can't imagine there are too many mountains in this world where you can take a train pretty much the entire way to the top. I mean I know there are some peaks in the Rockies and I'm sure in various other places all over the world that you can drive to. But train? Can't imagine there are too many. But there is one at Snowdon.

According to the quick briefing before we got before we boarded the Peris (that was the name of our train) for the summit, we were told that folks started visiting Snowdon for tourism purposes at about the end of the Napoleonic Wars. That would be at about the first or second decade of the 19th century, or the 1810s or so.

A few decades later, someone figured out it was possible to build a railway pretty near to the top and so they acquired the land (I guess...we were told no public lands were used for the railway) and went ahead and did it. The railroad took just 14 months from 1894 to 1896 to build. Voila! Tourist access to the top of the tallest mountain in England and Wales (but not Scotland)!

Stopped at a passing place part-way up the mountain.

I know what you might be thinking...isn't a mountain a little steep to be building a railroad on? I mean, isn't there like a maximum slope that you can really run a railroad? And not just up, but down too? Isn't this a recipe for failure? 

Well, yes, it would be. Last summer I wrote about this exact same issue with the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway after our visit to the Canadian Rockies. Railroads don't operate very well on sloped ground. The ability to move is based on the friction between the train's wheels and the tracks and the steeper the track is, the harder it is to move. Or stop.

So the builders of the railroad to the top of Snowdon designed it to be different. Take a look at the picture above. Not at our train but at the other track. That track has two outer rails like a typical railroad, but it also has two inner rails which are notched. It is these two inner rails that allow the engine to pull the cars of tourists to the top of the mountain. It's called a rack and pinion railway or a cog railway and the notched or toothed rails in the center of the track are matched with a gear on the engine itself. It's that mechanism that allows the train to ascend and keeps it in place so it will never descend uncontrolled in the event of some sort of emergency situation.

When you are being pulled up that railway you can feel the gravity working against you. The carriage shakes on the steepest portions of the hill as those teeth interlock with the track. You can also feel the whole train being held on the track on the way down. Like it's waiting to break loose but can't.

The rack and pinion railway in situ and in mockup form.

The original trains that took tourists up to the top of Snowdon were all steam powered. Today, the Snowdon Mountain Railway operates both diesel and steam trains on the same route. We wanted to take a steam train but they were sold out when we made our reservation for this mountain climb six months in advance (!!!!) so we settled for the diesel. I'm not sure the experience is much different. The hour long trip to the top and descent of the same length was still impressive and gorgeous and filled with views of sheep in fields. 

If there was a concern I had about this trip, it was the length of time we were allowed at the top of the mountain. The turnaround time between arrival at the top of mountain station and departure back down the slope was just 30 minutes. 

I shouldn't have worried. On the other hand, I could see myself worrying if I ever were do to this again.

The final push for the summit (I know I'm making it sound like we had done a lot to get close...) is not a huge effort. It's a quick walk up some steps to a monument at the top with a gold disc on top which points out what you can see in the distance from the summit. The queue to the top was slow, mostly because people were taking pictures of themselves or their traveling companions, and the way down was actually pretty treacherous, particularly if you have issues descending irregular rocky slopes like I do. After we got done with that, we made a quick stop at the souvenir store and we were back in plenty of time to make the return train.

However, that plenty of time scenario came with absolutely no view because the mountain was completely fogged in. It was so foggy that we could barely see five feet without the mist obscuring our view. I honestly would have liked to see the view from the top of Snowdon, particularly if you can see all the way to the Isle of Man or the Lake District. And I think if i had been able to see all that way, I would have been rushed.

The fog made it not an issue. 

Proof we made it to the top.

But the fog also made a huge impression on me.

I remember watching Ken Burns' The National Parks and being told that Denali (North America's tallest mountain) in Alaska was so massive that it created its own weather. I thought that made sense at 20,000 plus feet all the way in Alaska, even if it was embedded within a mountain range. I'd heard or read similar stories about flight paths that avoid the Himalayas in Asia for the same reason.

I didn't consider Snowdon a real mountain before we visited this year. Even considering when I visited Snowdon as a kid in England and had a snowball fight in June somewhere up the slope. I mean the top elevation of the mountain is about half the elevation of the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. In my mind, I couldn't see Snowdon having any real effect on the weather. I took a jacket, but I almost didn't. And I only took a jacket because I thought it might rain because it can rain at any time in Britain no matter the current conditions.

But here's the thing. It was warm and sunny at the base of the mountain that day when we boarded the railway. It was also warm and sunny when we got back to the base of the mountain, as it was when we were about maybe a third of the way up. But at the top, a mere 3,500 feet or so above sea level, it was not. The weather was completely different, including a dense layer of fog that somehow the sun seemed unabel to penetrate when you were standing (or training) just a couple of thousand feet lower. How is it possible that a hill affects the weather that much? It honestly elevated my respect for Snowdon.

We visited Snowdon because we wanted to get to the top of the highest peak in England/Wales. We thought it would be a comfortable journey to the top along a standard railway and that we'd get a great view of the Welsh countryside. We didn't get that at all. We came away impressed by the railway and how different it was from anything we'd ridden before. 

But we came away more impressed with Snowdon. The Mountain named Snowdon. It was obviously wild and inhospitable despite it being late May and despite the Mountain not being really that tall compared to some other mountains we'd visited. It's not all about size, I guess.

Snowdon done! Maybe the next mountain we come to we'll walk. Or not. Maybe.

Of course there's a pub called The Snowdon. In Llandudno.

Wales

It's easy to overlook Wales. Or not know it's there. Or forget about it entirely, even. 

Assuming you even knew about or had heard about Wales in the first place, can you pinpoint it on a map? And if you can, do you even want to spend time there? What's the big deal?

It's confusing to understand the appeal of the place. And political divisions and history and a re-emergence of national identity with a resurrected language after playing second fiddle (or is it third fiddle?) for a millennium or so don't help clarify anything.

It sits just to the west of England so is it part of England? Is it a separate country? How does it relate to Scotland and the United Kingdom and the British Isles and Great Britain? Why is there a Wales national team in the football (soccer) World Cup (although not this year) but not at the Olympic Games? Is Ireland in the mix here somehow? Or is that a different country? Or is the island of Ireland not just one country but two? And does that last question even have anything to with Wales? These are some tough questions to answer. It's difficult enough for people who have lived their entire lives near Wales, let alone folks who have never been there or contemplated being there. 

This year, we decided that we would spend more days and nights in Wales traveling than we would spend anywhere else abroad in 2026. Hopefully we'd get some clarity about just what this Wales place is and was. Hopefully.

Four puffins and a dragon. There are a lot of both in Wales.

There was a time it felt like I was in Wales a lot. Not a lot like living there or anything but it seemed like every summer in the mid-1970s (before we emigrated to the United States), we would borrow the caravan from my dad's mum and dad and take it and roam around Wales for a week or two. Probably. I don't know how many years it was, really. Maybe it was two. Maybe it was four. Maybe it was somewhere in between. I don't even know if it was one week at a time or two. Or if it was once or twice or three times a year. I just remember being in Wales a lot. Like every summer for a while. I can remember Portugal at age 4 and France at age 9 and 10. In between, all I remember travel-wise is Wales. 

I've stayed away since. Until this year. And honestly, my wife made me do it.

I resisted going back to Wales. I fought it. I'd been there already. Many times. And I was convinced there was nothing interesting to do there. 

For years, I got my way. But love and marriage is not always about getting your way. Sometimes you have to give in. Sometimes you have to let go. And sometimes when you stop fighting about the concept of something because you think it's going to be boring, you might end up loving the actual thing you've been fighting all this time. Sometimes, intertwined about and around all the other spectacular places on this planet that you want to visit, you have to go back to Wales and give it a shot. Once. Probably. 

I did. It was worth it.

Welsh cakes in Cardiff Market. Welsh cakes are very, very good.

Rainy Aberystwyth as seen from about halfway down the Aberystwyth Cliff Railway.

We didn't tour around Wales in 2026 in a caravan. We rented a car and we stayed in hotels. Bed and breakfasts in Llandudno in the north and Aberaeron in the west and a big, renovated Hilton with dysfunctional elevators in Cardiff. We thought Llandudno was a useful place to stay to daytrip from; we were underwhelmed by Cardiff; and we loved Aberaeron. I could easily live in our hotel room on the top floor of the Harbourmaster Hotel in Aberaeron harbor (or harbour, if you prefer) and look out over the Cardigan Bay for weeks or months. Or at least more than the three days that we actually did.

We explored Wales in a way that I never had as a kid. I imagine we had a lot more freedom than my parents did 50 or so years when they took me and my sister there. There was no caravan to drag around this year.  There were no kids needing to be catered to. And we probably are a bit more tolerant of driving hours and hours to get to places that are in the absolute middle of nowhere just so we can get a signature Wales experience than my parents were all those years ago. 

And full disclosure, there was a lot of driving with a lot of time spent on two-way, one-lane roads between hedges about six feet high on either side that curved between mostly farm properties with very little visibility and a sort of constant, continuing prayer that there is no other car actually on the road coming the other way any time soon. It's not relaxing driving. It's stressful.

It's also absolutely gorgeous. There are roads in Wales where you can be completely surrounded by green as you wind your way through the landscape. I mean hedges on both sides, fields in front of you and a full canopy of tree leaves over your head. There is green dripping all around you other than the thin strip of asphalt (with no center divider stripe) that you are traveling on. It's green in a way that other roads that I have driven in other countries have never quite been. 

Cefn-Coen Viaduct (top) and the resting place of the victims of the Aberfan mining disaster (bottom).

So is everything that exists in Wales boring? Absolutely not. I was way off base on my thinking here. I have no idea now why I fought against a Wales trip for so long. Just plain wrong might just sum up my attitude towards the place.

We split our time in Wales doing mostly two things: exploring history and exploring nature. Those two things are just fine with me. We spend a lot of time focusing on both when we travel. Nature in Wales meant the coast and the seaside. Nature also meant wildlife reserves and farms and boats to islands packed with birds. It meant mountains. It even meant driving down those completely green two-way, one-lane roads. It is everywhere in Wales. 

Welsh history is darker than Welsh nature. Edward I conquered Wales and made the Welsh feel every part of it. Rich men used poor men to extract slate and coal from the Earth and transported their spoils over fantastic works of civil engineering. And men invented massive machines to process a product so simple but so valuable and in the process wrecked a cottage industry comprised of men and women working out of their homes.

The event from Welsh history that hit us hardest though was in a town called Aberfan near Merthyr Tydfil just a bit north of Cardiff in the center of mining country. On October 21, 1966, a colliery spoils tip collapsed and cascaded down a hill and buried the Pantglas Junior School. It killed 116 children and 28 adults, most within the school itself. Of all the ways to go out of life, I can't imagine too many ways more awful than being buried in coal spoils as a child. The cemetery holding the victims of this disaster is chilling. Just grave after grave of kids aged between 7 and 10. It's discouraging.

Aberaeron harbour from our hotel room (top) and jackdaws and chimney pots (bottom). Chimney pots were definitely a thing.

There's one other thing we did in Wales: spend time with extended family.

One of the reasons we visit the United Kingdom every two years is so I can maintain connection with some of my extended family. Emigrating to the United States in 1979 effectively cut us off from most of our relatives and my refusal to travel back to England to maintain that connection for a period of about 20 years from the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s (is that the right term for the aughts?) didn't help matters any. 

But lately I've made a conscious effort to do more, so England trips in 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2024 and a Scotland trip in 2022 have always included a stop for a couple of days in Yorkshire, which is where most of my family is now. The script is the same: train into town and stay one day with one side of the family, find a way over to the other side and then move on after the second night. It never feels like enough.

So on this trip we were fortunate to be able to coax both sides of my extended family to Wales for a day or two. I love traveling with other people sometimes and so being able to supplement one or two days with extra people was a plus. But considering we managed to meet up with the very people who are a significant reason behind why we visit that country so often was a giant plus. 

This whole thing worked out great. 

Oh...those questions earlier. Wales is not part of England but not really a separate country either. It has nothing to do with Scotland except being on the same island and it's part of both the United Kingdom (full name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), the British Isles (which includes the entire island of Ireland as well as all the other islands in that part of the seas) and Great Britain. The Republic of Ireland is a totally separate country from the United Kingdom but the U.K. does have some territory on the island of Ireland. And I have no Earthly clue why Wales is represented separately at the World Cup and not at the Olympic Games.

Blog posts to follow.

Nothing like having a pint with family. In Cardiff.