After a long, long day yesterday, I decided it was best not to have any screen time before bed and fell asleep quickly. I had woken myself up at 5:10 yesterday in order to have a relaxed morning but given that we had stayed up watching "Perks of Being a Wallflower" well after the time I had said I was hoping to start a movie. It was 11 pm when I discovered my phone I use for Whatsapp had gone missing and then spent a further half hour looking for it. The last thing I had remembered doing was putting it into the pocket of my shorts and then changing into sweatpants. So it should have been on the bed in my tent. Anyway, long story short is I started my journey to Wales at 7:45 on maybe 4 or 5 hours of sleep. The first train I caught was an earlier train than I planned but it gave me a full hour to relax at Birmingham International since there was only going to be 5 minutes between my two trains. The second train was one that split in two and half would go one direction and the other would do a different direction. Since my destination, Porthmadog, wasn't on the scrolling list above the aisle, I started getting rather anxious despite being assured by a couple people that a couple of the cars are going in that direction after the split. It was the first time being on a train that didn't provide a full list but I guess when the carriages split partway through the journey they don't add all the outlying towns. I was eventually shown on an app on someone's phone that all was well and when they punched my ticket I knew I was on the right half of the train.
After the train ride I went into a pub and asked about possible forms of transportation and learned there was a bus that ran every hour that I could catch just under 100 yards away and was lucky enough to only wait 20 minutes in the pub for it. I took it most of the way to my final destination but then discovered that if I had stayed on it for at least another three miles, I would have been in the right place to start walking to the hostel which had claimed not to be open for check-in's after 6:30. By the time I was in the correct town, I had fifty minutes to find my way there. With the help of a local, I get directions and after turning onto the correct road I saw a family in the midst of walking from their car to their house and I hurry my steps as to double check that I am indeed really close to the hostel. After our brief conversation and the assurance that it was just 0.4 mi away, I walked on. Moments later, one of them calls out "Would you like a ride there?" Of course, being weary, I said yes. There was an RV parked out front but no one in the hostel and the door was locked. Luckily, I was able to borrow a phone from an elderly lady in the RV and dial one of the numbers taped to the front door to find out where keys had been placed and that I was in room #1. (The couple in the caravan had thought this place was still a golf course thanks to an outdated GPS.)
At this point, I'm rather famished but tired enough to fall asleep through the hunger pangs. I did eat enough but my last snack was a small Pukka Pie from the Pub in Porthmadog around 3:30.
Shortly after settling in and snapping some photos of the low hanging clouds on the horizon, I meet someone else staying at the hostel. Given my state of mind at the time, I can't recall how everything fell into place, but he ended up offering to drive me to a place to have dinner and we split the bill. I ordered loaded nachos and liver with mashed potatoes and ended up with three meals on two plates. (We boxed both the nachos and the liver and I finished 3 of the 4 tupperware containers this evening.)
Today, after a very recuperative sleep, I got a ride down the hill (with my laptop) to a hotel that offers a 10% discount to guests at the Bunkhouse I'm staying in. While there, I run into another couple and find out they're going to the exact same place that day that I had planned to go, Zip World (the location just a mile outside of Blanau Ffestiniog). During breakfast, with their help, I was able to us the WiFi to send my Zip World ticket (for the Bounce Below portion of the park) to the hotel in order to get it printed out. Immediately after I finished eating, around 8:40, I dashed back, on foot, to put my laptop back in my room at the bunkhouse. They had let me know that they were going to have to leave by 9:30. On my way back to meet them, it was all down hill, so I ran pretty much the whole way and got there by 9:15. I was getting an unexpected and 100% appreciated ride towards the caverns. Since I had originally booked myself in for 2 pm, they planned to just drop me in town. I used the opportunity to buy a much cheaper lunch for later and then walked to Zip World anyway to see what might happen.
I arrived around 10:30 and the person at the front desk offered to change my time slot to 11. I got a full hour and fifteen minutes of jumping on giant nets in a colorfully lit cavern. It actually reminded me a lot of what roller rinks were like. The incomplete lighting throwing things into shadow, the music in the background and a large group of people having the time of their lives. And of course, young kids falling down regularly. You could go up some stairs to get to higher nets and then slide down on mats through dark, silver tubes. It was a ton of fun but as you might expect from crowded trampolines, you don't always get the height you want and sometimes even get a jarring landing that doesn't get you into the air at all.
Afterward, I did some stretching and checked out the cafe for a while as well as the gift shop. Then I walked back into town, found a couple of 50 pence books to read and leave somewhere, caught a bus back towards my hostel. Throughout my many walks, there was a misty rain falling and I stopped several times in order to capture the water droplets on the blades of grass or on pretty leaves.
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