Judith's blog

A miserable day. Much worse than the already crap forecast. It should have cleared up in the afternoon, but there were still heavy showers around at 5pm, with the rain drumming on the roof. Once the sky cleared the wind picked up and even the die-hard hopefuls had gone home.

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Geoff writes: whilst we were on holiday yesterday, we got a phone call from Simon in Brighton, to say that Mark Stewart, a hang gliding friend of ours from around here, had had a heart attack just before he was about to test fly a glider, and was in hospital. We heard nothing else, so hoped that was good news. Unfortunately, we heard today that he had died. Very upsetting. He had had heart problems before and had received a heart bypass, I think. He found the original problem himself, when trying out a new stethoscope on his heart – he was a vet – and on hearing some irregularity, went straight to the doctor, resulting in the bypass operation. But that was a few years ago, and all seemed ok, as far as we knew. We last saw him just a few weeks ago, in the hang gliding competition which was held on the LMSC sites, and had a few drinks with him in the evening. Mark was an extremely nice person, and we will miss seeing him on the hill. Our condolences to his family.

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We’d camped at the Riverside Camping near Blaenau Ffestiniog, ready for a visit to the Llechwedd Slate Caverns. We’ve been to coal mines, salt mines and other caves, but the slate mine was something completely different. The mountain has been hollowed out into 15 levels of massive chambers, mostly 80 feet high, which were carved out by by candle light, using hand tools and gun powder. The mine goes down 1500 feet below ground and you can go down to level 7, approximately 480′ below the summit. The tours were interesting, but could have been more informative and they were geared to fast throughput of visitors, so you didn’t get much of a chance to ask questions. Still a fascinating place though.

Blaenau Ffestiniog is dominated by the slate mining, which is now done open cast and all the surrounding hills are covered with slate debris, giving the town a fairly unique look. There’s not much to do and see around the town and although we hoped to do some walks round the slate quarries, the weather, which had been very co-operative so far, turned worse. The rain started to fall in earnest, and I’m not a big fan of walking in the rain. We thought the weather might be better on the south side of Snowdonia and headed for Dollgelau, but it was equally drizzly there, so we headed home.

My parents called in on their way to Ireland in the evening, so we had a nice catch-up over the dinner of cheese and wine they kindly brought from France.

See photos of today.

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We woke up and drove along the north side of the Llyn peninsula in search of breakfast. I’ve learnt various things about Wales this holiday:

1) The camping to cafe ratio on the northern part of the Llyn peninsula is completely crazy (millions of campsites, two cafes).

2) The Welsh aren’t big on pavements or parking.

We couldn’t eat in Aberdaron, because there was nowhere to park and it took us all the way to Caernarfon to find somewhere to eat. At Caernarfon, we went to see the castle, which is massive. We were there for a full 3 hours and still didn’t get round all the towers, passageways and nooks and crannies, so we were surprised to see the people who paid in the queue ahead of us leaving after just 17 minutes. A record of some sort, surely. Maybe for the shortest attention span ever.

The other thing I learnt is that the British seem to have become a nation of moaners. Each place we went to people were moaning about this, that and the other. There were even young apprentice moaners under the age of twelve. When in Rome and all that, I found myself starting to moan about stuff as well, but mostly my whinging was about all the moaners around me.

We love castles and got a tour, then read the whole exhibition and then watched the audio visual display, and would have bought the guidebook to look round more if we hadn’t been so hungry and thirsty. After a walk round the town we settled to a picnic in the main square which has a brilliant fountain. It has 24 jets which are controlled by a computer programme set to random patterns, so it changes all the time. There are gaps in the jets and loads of children were running past and through it, gambling on the programme not changing and them staying dry. Excellent fun.

We had to decide what to do next and I’ve always wanted to go to Anglesey. Geoff has dissuaded me before, telling me how flat and boring it is. I wanted to get an independent view, so we went to the Caernarfon tourist information. The bloke there described it as “flat and full of weirdos”, so we went on a boat trip on the Menai Strait instead.

We spent the evening driving through Snowdonia national park and stopped at Beddgelert. Lovely village, stunning river, limited parking.

See photos of today.

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We’ve been waiting to go on a short holiday for ages, but the weather hasn’t allowed for successive non-rainy days this summer, but we finally saw our opportunity this week. Strong winds and sunshine and showers. Perfect going away weather. We headed for Snowdonia first thing this morning with no real plan as to where to go. We decided to go to Porthmadog and find out in the tourist information what there was on offer and then decide our travel itinerary from there. Porthmadog itself wasn’t that much to write home about and I remember now why we drove through it without stopping last time. We did have a nice picnic by the marina though.

Next stop was Criccieth and the castle. Nice little village too. Since we were on the Llyn peninsula we decided to head along it (bypassing Phwelli completely) and on to Abersoch for a snooze on the beach and a walk. We ended the night in Aberdaron at the end of the peninsula in a lovely campsite right on the edge of the headland, with a sheer drop to the beach just outside the van.

See photos of today.

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Everyone was raving about the forecast in the run-up to today, since there was possibly some sunshine around. As the day got closer it was looking less promising, and I suspected a similar day to Sunday, with lots of cloud. The actual forecast was the catch-all “sunny intervals”. The actual weather was grey skies all day.

Our choice for the day was to go flying or go on holiday, so we decided to wait until lunchtime and see if it would develop into a flying day. I edited another webcast and Geoff did some work and the sky stayed cloudy, but then Kai called to say he had gone XC from the Wrekin and it was really thermic. So we got our stuff and rushed out. On the Long Mynd it was too far off, so we headed for the Lawley. Once we were over the top of the Long Mynd I still couldn’t see the ‘good sky’ Kai had talked about. It was wall-to-wall grey cloud, with only a very few embedded cumulus.

There didn’t seem to be much wind around, but since the Lawley gets blown out really easily, we assumed there would be plenty of breeze. Wrong. We walked up to the third pimple and it was still only 4mph and every bird within 2 miles was flapping. The fields below still haven’t been cut, so the landing options are limited, so in the end we conceded that it just wasn’t flyable and went off to archery instead.

Driving back over the Long Mynd we found Rich, Wayne and Ali and a strong westerly breeze. Rich said it was rough, so we just carried on home. Just not our day!

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The forecast said sunshine and showers from lunch time, so we headed out at 11.30am, when the sky started to look more promising and people started to get high on the Mynd. It was overcast all day, but the showers were just one short period of a few spots and it was flyable all day. It was a struggle to get really high and I pushed out to start with and then went to both ends of the ridge, thinking I would extend any XC flight with a few turn points at the beginning of the flight. As I got higher I started to get bunged up again and it was playing havoc with my ears and balance, so my thermalling was a bit all over the place. After more than an hour in the air, I felt I needed to clear my sinuses and landed for an extended nose-blow.

Geoff, meanwhile, had got high and went over the back, landing at Craven Arms. He got a lift back with John and Lyn, who are pilots who also moved here from the Peaks, but have been too busy restoring a house to go out flying.

I spent the rest of the afternoon tandem flying with Mick. We had high hopes of going XC, but flat vario batteries (and lack of thermals) thwarted us. He managed to scratch back up to top land and change batteries, but our next attempt put us in the bottom landing and we gave up at that point. Next time…

See photos of today.

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