WALES

It's now April 21 and we are leaving Dublin on the ferry Ulysses, the largest car carrying ferry boat in the world.  The trip across the Irish sea takes about 3½ hours before we arrive at Holyhead, in northwest Wales.  The size of the ferry boat made it a fairly smooth ride even with 40-50 knot winds and 2-3 foot waves.  

As we arrived in Wales (United Kingdom) there was no immigration, passport checks or customs.  Wales does have its own language and we began to see two-language signs.  Watching the evening news on television, the Welsh language sounded  like something from Star Trek.  They do not use vowels too much and put a lot of consonants together.

Our first stop was a town with the world's longest name:  LLANFAIRPWLLGWYNGYLLGOGERYCHWYRNDROBWLLLLANTYSILIOGOGOGOCH
That's 58 letters in all.  It means "The Church of Mary in the Hollow of the White Hazel Near the Fierce Whirlpool and the Church of Tysilio by the Red Cave."  We all had to try to pronounce the Welsh name.  We had our passports stamped with the unique name.  

We crossed the Menai Strait Bridge, with small St. Mary's Island in the middle of the strait, to reach the Wales mainland.  Heading east we crossed the Snowdon Mountains with a stop in the resort village of Betws-y-Coed.  I got a picture of the Conwy River Bridge as we drove by. 

We stayed overnight in the town of Wrexham, the highest village in Wales at 1300 feet.  We walked around the small town and just happened on the small St. Giles Church situated on a hill.  The next day we went over Horseshoe Pass at 1367 feet elevation.  The next drive-by was the Vale Crucis Abbey remains.  We then stopped at Llangollen on the River Dee.  For lunch we stopped in Ludlow to see the Ludlow Castle and St. Laurence Church.

We then had a pleasant drive through the Brecon-Beacons National Park on our way to Cardiff, the capitol of Wales.  We stopped in front of the Cardiff Castle (didn't have time to tour the inside) and walked around downtown Cardiff.  We stayed the night in the Cardiff Moat House.  The next morning we were back in England.

on to Western & Southern England