A Four Hour Exploration

Yesterday, despite having been shown around Bruges by a friend of mine on Sunday, I wondered the city for close to four hours without truly knowing where I was heading. I purposely set out in a different direction so I wasn't surprised or concerned about not knowing. I went down familiar streets, but never with any real destination in mind.
Throughout the day, I visited another church and paid 4 euros to see a museum within a cathedral. For lunch, which I had around three, I ate an Italian vegetarian sandwich with pesto and mozzarella with fresh squeezed orange juice on the side. After running across a map of the town, I started making my way back to the bed and breakfast.

Brussels to Bruges

After a good two hour free tour in Brussels, I hung out with a couple of other people to explore the city some more and we visited the palace of King Philip for free. Afterward, we went to lunch and got a sandwich with Belgian fries on it and then picked out some things to make for dinner as well as a few varieties of beer to try. That evening we had a small party in the kitchen and I got to try various Belgian beers which was fun. I was careful not to over do it since we were aware that the beer is stronger here.

On Saturday, I left Brussels in the afternoon after walking to some of the places we went to on the walking tour to get pictures. The bus ride was short and pleasant. Upon arrival with the help of a British couple, I got a taxi ride to a friend's relative's Bed and Breakfast. I have stayed two nights now and have helped around the house mainly cleaning the cabinets in the kitchen. My next stop will be a hostel on a boat in Ghent.

Walking Tour of Lille

Despite not getting much sleep last night between going to bed late and having the fire alarm go off, I was up around 8:30 and decided to go on the free walking tour of Lille after a couple cups of coffee. It was really fun because our guide was funny and sarcastic. The whole thing was in English since none of the people in our group were French. There was a German lady, someone from Wales, and Aussie couple and another American from Manhattan. The tour lasted from 10 to 12 and then I hung out with a few others in order to be sociable and since I was a bit concerned about finding my way back. We learned a lot about the history of the city and that the French were often cheap skates when it comes to building structures except for the time they spent the equivalent of 4 million euros in order to compensate a Protestant architect who won an anonymous competition to build a Catholic church. Tomorrow I will be heading to Brussels.

A Sunday Adventure

Today was pretty interesting. Yesterday I claimed to be 25 in order to get a discount for a train ticket and then heard (in French) what sounded like I'd have to verify my age to get on the train today. With all the what if's going through my head last night, I decided while just 3/4's awake this morning to attempt hitch-hiking. (Sorry to my parents who hate hearing about this kind of risk.) Everything went really well. I had 4 really nice people pick me up and during the last one, we stopped at her house for a major lunch with which they offered me beer. Since it had already been opened and poured in a glass for me, I accepted. (I'm not a beer lover.) They had given me so much food I forgot to think about dinner until after everything closed. Being a Sunday, all the stores are either closed all day or close very early. I ended up finding one tiny hole in the wall that was open and bought rice cakes and "la vache qui rit" or laughing cow cheese. This hostel is really cool, I just hope I have good luck with sleep.

One More Night

I'm staying one more night in Calais and then will go by train to Lille. After three nights there, I plan to head to Belgium.
Today after visiting Cap Blanc Nez, I wandered the town looking for a place with an available room for the night and was lucky to find a room for a reasonable price. By the time I got here, I was a bit tired and just hung out in my room for a good portion of the day. I look forward to writing about the new adventure that awaits me tomorrow!

Bristol to Calais (with photos)

Yesterday was a long day of travel. I woke up around 6 am and walked through the rain most of the 3 miles up to the bus stop where the National Express Coach was going to be. Along the way, I got myself breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and coffee. During this time I also made sure I wouldn't have to go to the bathroom in case the coach didn't have one. The bus was due at 8:30 and was to leave at 9:02, though perhaps because of the rain, it didn't arrive until 9:10. This was the first leg of my three part journey to Calais. I got off in London around 12:30 to pick up the next bus and had just enough time to get another coffee and go to the bathroom. This next bus brought me all the way over to Dover. (That rhyme was half intentional.) During the whole trip the sky was overcast and dropping varying amounts of rain but I was able to read and listen to my iPod. It seemed ironic that for my whole stay in the UK there was a drought and the moment I left, it decided to act the Britain again.
The greatest part of the journey was the ferry ride to Calais. Although there wasn't much to be excited about by other people's standards, I am lucky enough to find each new experience thrilling in it's own way. So I was inexplicably excited to be on a ferry, crossing the English Channel on a gray, gloomy evening. The waves weren't rocking us very much either; it was a smooth ride that could have been considered boring yet I enjoyed every minute of it. I got some fun pictures and had a very engaging conversation with someone in order to keep them distracted enough not to start panicking. They had heard crazy stories about a ferry that wasn't able to dock for 6 hours because the waves were too rough to safely approach its destination and about people on board getting severe sea sickness.
When we got to Calais around 8 pm, I ended up waiting close to two hours for a taxi ride because the people who got rides before me weren't going close enough to my hotel for it to be worth sharing. In the end with just 35 minutes to spare before reception closed at 10:30, I ended up getting a free ride with a couple to whom I vented a bit about my predicament. This wasn't the intention behind talking, I was just too tired to keep these thoughts to myself. I had been on the move in one way or another since 6 am and had waited in the rain at the beginning of my trip and then again at the end and I just wanted to sleep.
Today, I slept til 8 or 8:30, walked all the way to the beach and got myself a breakfast on the way there, then walked along the beach for a while. The feel of the sand was unique at one part of the wide beach. It felt softer than normal and I don't mean soft as in my feet sank into it, I mean soft as in a silk sheet with a high thread count. (Don't misinterpret this as me knowing what that's like in person. I only learned from other sources.) Just the same, it was exceptionally soft. My lunch and dinner today has been bread and Camembert cheese. It didn't take long to fall back into my French eating habits. When I came back to the hotel, I perused Facebook, but also tried to consider where to go next. I've decided it will be a last moment decision when I take a look at the train options tomorrow. I'm thinking seriously about Brussels and it wouldn't be too hard to get there or to find a place for the night. We'll see what the day brings.
Calais has been a wonderful place to explore and there were many unique things to take snapshots of and I ended up with another hundred or so photos by the end of my explorations.

A Walk Through Bristol

Today, after breakfast, I sat around for maybe half an hour before getting out and about. I wondered through Bristol for a good 2 hours. There are many cool buildings, coffee shops and even a Pizza Workshop where you can learn how to make your own pizza. I walked past at least three places where I could get more cheap books and ended up buying The Foreshadowing by Marcus Sedgewick and The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly for £1.50 each. Unfortunately, I spent much of the rest of the day sitting on the couch trying to make plans to take a ferry across to France and browsing Facebook. Although, I did also get laundry done today. Tomorrow I plan to go into an art exhibition that seems free and maybe check out the local library just for fun.

Fairy Glen and the Magic That Followed

Five days ago, I walked through Fairy Glen in Wales and had, after deleting apps on my phone, got my camera to start working again. It was a very green hillside with the sound of a river coming through the trees. There was moss growing all the way around the base of the trees and covering entire logs. I even saw branches wrapped in moss. The place was serene and it was a short, easy walk.
After getting back to town, I found out that the people I had run into yesterday contacted me to let me know their plans were changing. (What I left out about the 6th of August is that they had offered me a ride to a train station in Wolverhampton or to Bristol to stay the night at my new friend's college flat.) It's an off campus flat shared among students. In the first message, they were saying they were leaving in a couple hours (now, since I read this a couple hours late) and then another one saying they actually decided to climb Snowdon instead since the weather cleared up a bit. I ended up spending much of the day in town after that just in case they contacted me again which was silly since it takes a good 4 to 6 hours to go up and down Snowdon.
The following morning, I get a ride from my new friends at 9:30 and we make our way to Bristol. We made a stop for coffee and another for lunch. Upon arriving in Bristol in the afternoon, I see the flatmates have just paused "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" and I point to the TV and exclaim, "I approve!" and it was an instant bond. Around 6 or 7, we made our way to a local pub for bargain burger Wednesday.
Thursday, after a breakfast of buttered toast and coffee, I walked to the store with the friend I met on top of a mountain and then wandered all the way to the bottom of the street and before heading back I bought another cheap book, an American classic entitled A Separate Peace. I've now read Just a Boy and Redwall and re-read The Secret Life of Bees.
There was a lot of reluctance, but I did end up buying train tickets for that day and was back at Stanford Hall Thursday evening. Despite a mistake of misreading 14:00 as 4:00, I was able to get on the 4:00 train without a hitch. Even the change over was pretty seamless. I just had to ask where to catch a train to Rugby since it wasn't a final destination for any of the trains. Since I selected the 4:00 train instead of the 2:00 train, I happened to run into friends from Stanford Hall who were just about to head back. They had already found a ride with someone in their taxi. (She had already hailed down a taxi for herself, to get to Stanford Hall, and since it was a van, there was plenty of space.) I had gotten there at the perfect moment to get a free ride back with friends.
Friday was my first day of the Festival and I must say it was less crazy than the Give festival a while back. There were still plenty of people, but it wasn't as noisy as I was expecting. I used a meal voucher for a more fulfilling breakfast, took a look around at all the things going on and then spent most of my day reading my three in one Redwall book. Not feeling particularly hungry, I skipped lunch and had planned on taking a nap, but the sun had come out from behind the clouds and turned the tent into a furnace. That evening we all went to the festival to eat so that no one would have to cook.
Saturday, I started my morning with an 8 am gong bath. Having woken up pretty late, I just had time to go to the bathroom, brush my teeth and grab a bike. It was the most relaxing 90 minutes I've had in a long time despite missing breakfast. Afterward, I used another meal voucher to get a veggie sausage and egg sandwich on ciabatta. To end my day, I did a writing workshop, ate some dinner and had a really good, long chat with a friend of mine with whom I was sharing a tent.
Today, I started my day in the Midlands at Stanford Hall and now I am back in Bristol with my new friends. I'll let you know how the adventure develops. In the meantime, it's way past my bedtime. Over and out.

Another Day, Another Mountain

Today after a slow, lazy morning, I got out to Moel Siabod, a mountain that measures 872 m and provides a nice, long, steep slope and a spectacular view at the top. Unfortunately, the camera on my phone fizzled out today and it doesn't look like any photos taken during my hike are stored on my phone. It also seems that because the app keeps failing, it will be unable to upload yesterday's pictures onto Google photos. The good part of the day is that I fully enjoyed the climb to the top as I was not overly bothered with the tech malfunction. Another brilliant part of my day was that while at the top, I ran into a family on holiday from England and had a wonderful chat with one of them as we climbed down the side of the mountain. Because of them, I got to see another side of Moel Siabod and they offered to give me a ride into Betwsy-Coed. I ended the day with a shower and a Mediterranean sandwich I put together with an aubergine spread, garlic and herb cheese, semi-dried cherry tomatoes, and pitted olives stuffed with pickled garlic. It's something I tried out my first day here and decided to make it again.
Since the photos from this recent trip didn't come through I will share a couple from my first trip up Snowdon.

More Climbing Today

Yesterday, I spent my morning hanging out with some young guys at the previous hostel and ended up getting a ride into town to catch a bus to Betwsy-Coed where my next reservation had been made. Once I dropped my stuff there and made up my bed, I wandered through all the shops in town and found a good deal on some shoes and a new day pack pack. Everything in the store was at least 30% off and my shoes were about £55. Then I did some reading and went to bed.
Today I figured out an easy way to get to the base of Snowdon and climbed the mountain again. I had last done it a couple of weeks ago with a friend who volunteered occasionally at Stanford Hall when she offered to let me come along. Just two days after Bounce Below at Zip World, I was still a bit sore today but needed to get out and about. I bought some postcards at Pen-y-Pass and ended up hiking with a mother and her two kids up the Pyg Trail. I spent the day breaking in my new shoes to see how they'd hold up. Unfortunately, they seem too roomy for hiking but they should be good enough for easier walks and if I get thicker socks. After going up and down the mountain and happening to catch a bus right away, I ended up buying myself a pizza in town and ate all but the last piece. All I've been doing since the meal is reading my 50 pence books.

Photos from the Last Couple Days

Gifts From the Universe

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.

Another Trip to Wales

Today I finished making plans to visit Wales again. This time for 5 nights by myself. I've got the train tickets and finished making a second reservation for my stay. It's a popular place for a "holiday" so I had to find two separate places and will figure out the transportation later. I've spent about 70 days of my 90 day visa here so I want to see more and take a long break. That said, the Tribe of Doris Festival will be coming to Stanford Hall from the 8th through the 12th and I am interested in seeing some of that. Immediately afterward, I might be looking for a ferry ride back to France. It's been getting a bit stressful to run everything in plant care here and I'm getting itchy feet. We're back down in numbers but still a majority French and I had been unsure about leaving while Graham was going on a 4 day holiday. He left yesterday.