Haha, remember how I went to bed at 1, and how I was supposed to be in the van by 6:30? I do! Funny thing about my brain at 1 in the morning, is that it doesn't always connect the simple dots. For example, if I need to be in the van by 6:30, I probably should have adjusted my alarm for 5:25 instead of 6:25. Oops. Fortunately, the people upstairs gave me a hand and woke me up a little before 6.
I knew I had less time to pack up my clothes now for our big trip. I hurried downstairs to get my clothes off the lines that they had been on all night. Katy greeted me in the unusually dark kitchen.
"Good morning, Rachel! Did you know it rained all night?" She said.
....What?
I looked outside the window to our patio, to see all of my clothes hanging heavily on the lines, sopping with rain water.
Bring it on, rain.
I grabbed a garbage bag and put all my waterlogged clothes inside. Then I took them to the shower and wrung them all out as much as I could. I went back to my closet and found that I fortunately had one last set of clean clothes, though it was a t-shirt and shorts. I knew we would be in the rain a little today, and that we were also hiking Mt. Snowdon, so I wasn't sure how I felt about that outfit, but I didn't have time to question the turn of events. I picked out the wet clothes I needed to take, and stored them in the shopping bag. I would have loved to put them in my towel, but that was sopping wet too. Brilliant.
I got everything packed as best as I could, then went downstairs for a three second breakfast. Josie told me then that she wanted some help using up her Nutella so she could wash the glass jar and use it for the rocks she had been collecting. This morning, I was very happy to help her out. I popped some bread in the toaster, whipped up a toasted PB and Nutella sandwich, and happily munched on it as I took my gear out to the van.
Unfortunately, the van smelled horrid that day. I don't know if it was the person I was sitting next to or something under their seat, but it was really Really bad! And it wasnt my damp clothes, because I had those bags tied down along the front with the other things.
We started our two hour drive by going to a gas station to fill up. Unfortunately, the gas station had been struck by lightning during the night, so there was no gas to be had there. Honestly, I'm just surprised that the whole place hadn't gone up in smoke! So we found another a bit down the road and were on our way.
Two hours later, we arrived in the town of Abwryswith and pulled up to the National Library of Wales. We got there minutes before the doors opened and met our guide at the front lobby.
This library is crazy cool, in that it is required by law to receive three copies of every book, magazine, and map published in Wales free of charge. As a reference library, nothing is allowed to ever leave the building, though anyone can come in and read through the material.
Sir William Henry, upon his death, decided that he wanted donate his entire ancient document collection to the National Welsh Library. This was how this Library came to own three first edition Charles Dickens novels (including A Christmas Carol!!), THE British Magna Carta, THE Black Book of Wales, AND a 16th century copy of the Bible translated by Sir William Morgan for Queen Elizabeth I !!!!! Holy dang! And those were only a few of the huge collection that was donated to the Museum by Sir Henry. Good grief, I got to see all these treasures with my OWN EYES!! It was amazing! The museum was set up really cool, with special anti-fire rooms that fill with CO2, 15-ton shelves that you can slide across a room by just casually turning a wheel on the side.
Thousands of mideaval illuminated maps, hundreds of original aristocratic paintings, whole rooms full of giant bound books of every newspaper printed in England and Wales since 1911, and hundreds of thousands of books. It was a really awesome library!
Our next stop as we headed north was to Harlech castle. This was a pretty quick stop, as it started raining again a little, and there wasn't a whole lot of new stuff to see.
Next we went up to Cricceith Castle. We actually met with a friend of Tom's and the man's whole family, consisting of a wife and 9 kids! This family was super cool because the older children had been born and raised in the US up until 4 years ago, when they moved to Sweden. Their youngest three were born there in Sweden. A year ago though, the whole family moved to Wales, where they lived right between Cricceith and the beach.
It was really cool talking to the kids who remembered living in the US. They all have American accents, but a few have more of Welsh accents now more than others. They had all taken a hard-core eight week course in Welsh, so they were all fluent in the language now. Lucky. It was interesting hearing how the British kids really picked on these US kids because of their accents. I guess it really doesn't take much at all for kids to pounce on each other. Kind of ironic, for the only group of people on earth who can also make friends the fastest.
We walked around the old Cricceith ruins, one of the many castles we had been to recently that made the Iron Ring of King Edward I back in the day. Its amazing to think that these ultimate powerhouses, these 'Chess Queens' of world takeover, now lay in crumbled ruins; such a trivial little clump of brick and earth in today's view of war power and invasion. My, how the world has changed...
After we were here for about an hour, we piled into our very tight-packed van and headed for the base of Mt. Snowdon. This is the tallest mountain in all of Wales. It isn't much taller than anything in Utah, but it is certainly not a hike for many. When we got out, I loaded a few bottles of water and poweraid, some trail snacks for Lydia and I to split, and a light jacket in case of rain into my hiking pack. When Tom gave the word, we were all off.
Now, I'm really not in good shape, so I've actually been really nervous about climbing Snowdon. I told myself for months before I came here that I was going to hike the Y a ton to get ready for Snowdon, but I did a lot more interesting things instead.
So, I just decided to hit it as hard as my legs would let me and see what would happen.
...I also made sure that I said a prayer or two to get some real help. :)
You know how hikes go, my patient reader; they're typically lovely but strenuous journeys along mountain paths to a great lookout point. This was just the craziest one Ive ever done. It was indeed very lovely, we went around three lakes and along an incredible view of the mountains. I took progressive pictures of the lakes as I went higher and higher up the face.
Somehow I made the three hour cutoff time to be at the top of the mountain. Tom and two others had been up there about a half hour before I reached the crest. Courtney and Anders got there shortly after, and two others got there about fifteen minutes before me. I was the eighth to get up to the crest, and Tom told me that I had just made the three-hour cutoff, so he was going down to tell everyone else to turn back where they were. Sweet!!! I was going to make it to the top!!
It took me about another fifteen minutes before I reached the summit. The other seven, with the exception of Miya, had passed me and were heading back down. Miya realized that I was at the very end of the line now, so she walked with me to the very end so that I wouldn't be alone for it. She cheered me on those last few climbs and even snapped some photos of me when I got there.
It was so cool up there! I knew it must be cold, but the hike was exerting enough that I really didnt feel it. The whole top part of the mountain was engulfed by a big silver cloud, and I was swimming in it. Seriously, there was one point where I could only see about ten feet in any direction, and then it was just white all around. It made for a terrible view up there, but the chance to be in that cloud was so dang cool! I remember I looked down at my arm at one point, and every little hair was covered in dew drops. My hair was soaking wet (I'll blame it all on the cloud :) ), and the air seemed thinner but heavy. I realized then that I was really glad I was from Utah and used to crazy high altitudes. I had climbed three thousand feet, but that was still nothing compared to the thin air I'm used to.
But now we were at the very end of the line, with a lot of minutes separating us from the next few people, and the summit was completely socked in. To top it all off, for those a bit nervous about heights, those steep ledges we had climbed up were a lot easier going up than going down. Miya wasn't so nervous about it, but I sure was. It took a little while before I got more comfortable with the idea of running down the rocks. Honestly, the thing that surprisingly helped most was singing fun songs. We did everything from How Firm the Foundation to Smashmouth. It was perfect for taking my mind off of the cliff sides we were going along.
We eventually caught up to Mandi and Bronte, so our group size doubled. We traveled the rest of the way down the mountain with these girls, which made the trip even better.
The trail was very difficult to follow, as it was just a line of slightly smaller rocks along the great rock face and many nearly vertical fields of grass. Every now and then, some raised stones made steps that showed you were still on the correct path. As I was going up, I remember getting lost for a little while, as the two barely distinguishable paths had to be bridged, but without an outlined bridge. When we were coming down, we had passed three cairns, though I had only passed one coming up. When I looked down, the cloud had cleared enough for me to realize that we had come too far around the mountain and had missed the spot where we had bridged the upper and lower main trails. We backtracked for a little bit, and then found a steep rocky area we thought would work as the bridge down to the lower path. As we slid down this section off the edge of the trail, we came to a point where the rocks fell away at too steep a grade to continue; the only way down from that edge was to jump down, a good 40 feet before it sloped again. The shale was too slick to try to climb back up to the trail though, so we decided to keep going sideways across the mountain to the lower trail. The shale we had come down on ended and turned into grass soon, but it was level enough to walk on as we cleared a little ridge that hid the next part of the mountain face. When we came to the top of the small ridge, we saw the lower main trail, straight across from where we were, on the far side of the vertical dip in the mountain. The problem was, the face between us sloped very sharply and was all grass, no rocks. We tried turning around and going back up, but the shale couldn't hold us. So we decided to go straight across the face to the rock path on the far side.
At this moment, my fear was gone. This was because Mandi suddenly said that she was very scared, and wasn't sure her shoes had enough grip to keep her from sliding down the steep face. I stayed close behind her, and just kept telling her that she was doing awesome and that it was all going to be okay. Being able to take that role for her really helped me to forget about what I was doing and help someone in a scary moment. I wish I was the kind of person who could do that more often.
We made it across by walking upright on some divinely upheld patches of grass and dirt, but the slope was so steep that our whole sides were rubbing up against the field of grass that we were holding on to. It was craziness. As we got closer to the other side, there were more rocks to use. Seriously, Heaven was hard at work that day, as none of us slipped once on the wet grass, dirt, or stones.
Would I have liked to do it another way? Heck yeah, via escalator!
But did I learn something? Yup: I really don't believe in coincidences.
We made it down to the craggy rocks again, resumed our quick jaunt down the face, and finally made it down to the edge of the third lake once more. We had made it off the mountain. Oh gosh, my legs were shaking so bad with fatigue and nervousness that I was afraid the other girls would be able to hear them!
Miya, our Olympiad, decided to jog ahead to let Tom know that we had made it off and had to make the long walk around the last two little lakes before we made it to the van, a 45 minute trip. The rest of us did what we could. Bronte, who has a very long stride, quickly gained some turf ahead of me. I knew I had enough to jog for a few minutes at a time, so I started running when I could, but then realized my stupidity in leaving Mandi, who said she had no intention of running, alone at the back and waited for her. No one likes to be left at the back. We made the long walk back together. It was an absolutely gorgeous place, and we admired it as much as we could while walking as quickly as we could. I convinced Mandi to jog a bit on the steep downhill spots, so that sped us up a little bit.
About forty minutes later, we made it to the van. Everyone else was waiting there. I was expecting Tom to be upset with me because we were so late in getting back. Everyone cheered for us as we ran down the last big hill and hopped in. I apologized all over to Tom, but he just greeted me with a smile and thanked me for staying with Mandi. It took me a while to stop being angry at myself, but seeing that no one else was angry with me really surprised me and cut that pretty short too. I was still feeling a bit embarrassed by the time we pulled up to the hostel, but I was just more exhausted than anything by that point.
I had been staring at our hostel for a few minutes before I finally looked around to see where we were. The hostel was a tiny little building on a beautiful tree-filled hilltop in the tiny town of Llanberis. Our host met us outside and told us that all 17 of us had filled the whole hostel, so we had the place all to ourselves. He told us where we could find all the shower stalls, coffe (and hot chocolate/tea) maker, free tv, wifi, and towels. When we went up to our rooms, again easily divided by house, we saw that for the first time, our beds were made up for us when we walked in. EXCELLENT service!
More than anything, I was super excited to just take a shower. Miya had accidentally snapped at Tom when he put his hand on her shoulder as she jumped out of the van. "Do not touch me!" She said, "I'm am covered in a whole layer of salt water, so don't touch me when I'm this gross!" She just as quickly apologized and told him that she was just tired and super dirty. He seemed very surprised, but also very characteristically forgiving, as is his great nature. I just thought it was really funny. :)
The first thing I did was to hang up the damp clothes that I had brought for the trip. The next was to plug in my dying electronics. Then I borrowed a towel and went straight for the showers. I was so dead tired, but refreshed when I got back to my room. Theresa and I stretched out our tired muscles before finishing up our days with some scriptures and prayers. Then it was a very lovely 'lights out' and a very lovely sleep.
Today, I got my clothes rained on, then looked at a bunch of castles, and then sat on top of the pillar on the summit of Mt. Snowdon. How's that for a ridiculous summary of a seriously rad day?
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