Ireland day 1029. Tuesday 23 July 2024- NW UK Day 4

Today’s summary	After breakfast at the hotel, drove to Bodnant Gardens, near Conwy in North Wales, where we met friends. Had a good look round the gardens after lunch and innumerable cups of tea. A beautiful day with plenty of sunshine and lots of catching up to be done. Drove on to Holyhead and caught the 20:30 Stena back to Dublin.
Today’s weather	Bright and sunny all day until late afternoon, when it hazed over. Light north westerly wind. Appx 20c

Today’s overview location (The red mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The red line shows where we walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Bodnant

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

Today marked part 3 of our “catching up with friends” mini-break. First, though, we had breakfast at the hotel and checked out at the relatively civilised time of 11am. We were soon on the road heading westwards on the North Wales expressway, for the 60-minute drive to Bodnant Gardens.

The gardens are just to the south of Conwy and are apparently renowned for their various reference collections of plants. Neither Val nor I had ever been before – and it also turned out that I was at University with the current owner of the large house in whose grounds the gardens are situated (we weren’t invited in for tea).

We arrived at noon, just almost exactly the same time as the friends we had arranged to meet for the afternoon. Of course the first stop was the café, for light lunch (ice cream in my case) and the first of several cups of tea. Then we headed into the gardens (National Trust) which were looking stunning on this sunny afternoon, after all the recent rain.

Eventually, after we had explored the whole of the very extensive garden (including the renowned Laburnum Arch – which finished flowering a couple of months ago), we had to say our goodbyes. So after one final cup of tea, we headed off down the Expressway once more, destination Holyhead and the Stena ferry terminal.

We arrived at Holyhead in plenty of time for our 20:30 departure, so we diverted into town to get fish and chips for dinner. We drove on and enjoyed our tasty meal in the comfort of our car whilst in the queue waiting to board.

Anyway, we’re about to drive onboard now, so it’s time to sign off and get moving. It’s a pleasant evening and quite calm, so hopefully it should be plain sailing all the way back to Dublin.*

* As you can see from the photo below – it wasn’t entirely plan sailing after all but we made it onboard in the nick of time and are on our way now. Alls well that ends well..

Normal service to be resumed tomorrow!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Bodnant House, between the trees. It’s privately owned, but originally donated the gardens to the National Trust in 1949	With Bev and Pete – enjoying the sun!

The Old Mill	Laburnum Arch (minus the flowers)

Dinner- very nice!	Heart stopping moment! Car wouldn’t start when it was our turn to get on the boat. Flat battery due to me(!!) trying to charge my mobile phone from the car USB socket when the engine was turned off. Luckily the Stena engineer came along with his battery pack and quickly got us in our way. Phew.

Stunning herbaceous border, with crocosmias, among others