Tuesday, August 10 Visit to Cambridge

So I should be doing homework, but I'd rather be doing this!

Sunday and Monday we caught up on sleep and laundry and grocery shopping, then got up early Tuesday morning to catch the train to Cambridge (which is just past London). We got off the train (hobo kits in hand - that's important later) and did a quick walking tour of the colleges. It was a PERFECT day and we thoroughly enjoyed the weather by getting ice cream and just sitting in the parks.

Welcome sign in the street on our way to the Information Center

A church we saw while stopped at a red light
Some of the lovely architecture
Lab where lots of important things happened, including the discovery of electrons. Goooo Cambridge!

Peterborough College Chapel, a really pretty building
Me in the courtyard of Peterborough College
More architecture
Entrance to Trinity College, where we actually spent the 2 pounds to go inside and see the chapel
Part of the courtyard of Trinity College - look at the ivy covering those buildings!
Me on the other side of the courtyard at Trinity. The chapel is right behind me.
Inside of Trinity Chapel
Again in Trinity Chapel, with the statue of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, an alumnus of Cambridge and one of my favorite poets of all time
The Wren Library at Trinity College, where we got to see manuscripts from Tennyson, Isaac Newton, A.A. Milne, Spenser, Shakespeare, and tons of other incredible things. I cried.
Pretty stream directly behind the Wren Library (it would be just the the right of this scene), where you can get a glimpse of just how glorious a day it was

Saturday, August 7

I know, I'm really far behind, but I promise there's not much of the story left :)

On our drive back to Cardiff from York, we stopped at Preston to see some church history sites. We met a guy there that Tom knows, Peter, and he was our tour guide for the morning. It was great.

This is where we met Petah. It's called Market Square, and it's where the very first LDS missionaries taught. President Hinckley also taught here when he was a missionary in Preston during the 30s.

This is the view of one of the old inns in Preston, possibly where the missionaries stayed during their first few weeks (Peter is in the foreground, but you can't see him very well)
The other side of the street, where another old inn sits that could have possibly housed the missionaries on their first stay
A really pretty old church in Preston that I took a picture of just because :)

An alleyway where one of the first converts and his wife lived. He was originally Jewish, converted to Anglicanism, married an English wife, then heard the missionaries teach, got baptized, and moved to Nauvoo. While there he tutored Joseph Smith in German and Hebrew (this guy knew 7 languages) and practiced dentistry in Brigham Young's parlour. Wish I could remember his name....

View of the house of an elderly widow where the missionaries stayed for a longer period of several months. This is where they had that vision recorded in Church History.....crazy story. Anyway, the place went up for sale several years ago, the press heard about the story and started calling this place "The Devil's House." It still sits empty, and has never been sold.

Pretty park in central Preston where all the rich people's servants used to take their laundry to dry. So basically the center of Preston gossip...

The River Ribble, where the first baptisms in Britain took place. It's gorgeous.

Me in front of the Preston (Chorley) Temple

With some of the pretty flowers in front of the temple doors

After our tour of Preston, we drove a few hours more until we stopped at Powis Castle in Wales, home of one of the largest collections of Far Eastern paraphenalia in Britain. I and one other girl from our group got left behind on the tour......which is just as well since we weren't allowed to take pictures inside the place, anyway. So we got more time to roam the gardens (which were quite extensive) and take pictures...

This is a side view of the castle. Straight through the doors is the courtyard and such, to the left is a steep hill at the bottom of which is the parking lot (whoopee) and to the right is a steep, landscaped hill leading down into the gardens

On the back side of the castle, from the terrace below. This is a little greenhouse-type place built into the hill, looking out over the gardens. Very picturesque.

Only a partial view of the gardens - they stretched from above where I was standing to where the treeline is. You can get a sense of how large and varied they are.

Another back view of the castle, with both terraces in view. Only about half-way down the hill leading to the rest of the gardens.

View from the far garden of the castle (left), holiday cottage (middle) and servants' quarters (right). I wasn't kidding about the gardens being huge.

After Powis we all loaded up in the van (again) and asked our GPS "Gypsy" to take us HOME! We hadn't been in Cardiff since Monday morning and were so ready to take a short rest from all the craziness!

Edinburgh

So, I fail at writing on this blog. I didn't finish before classes started, so that just means I get to do it now instead of homework. I don't have a very good blog ethic...

Okay, Edinburgh! We started the day at 7am by riding a high-speed train from York to Edinburgh, almost a 3 hour trip. We got there mid-morning and the weather was just gorgeous! The sky was blue with big white fluffy clouds and it was actually warm enough that I didn't have goosebumps - quite a rarity for the whole trip in general. We all got into the castle together and had a Scottish tour guide named Andrew who wore a kilt and had the most amazing accent. The castle was actually built on a dormant volcano, so there's volcanic rock and stuff in the gardens. Way cool.

The castle

Me in the Royal Apartments were we actually weren't allowed to take pictures. Sh. The Royal Apartments are where Mary Queen of Scots lived and where she gave birth the James VI who would become James I of England when he succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603.
Me on the walls of the castle, looking out over Edinburgh and over the the North Sea. It was quite a view, and the city is breath-taking.
After the castle, we walked down the Royal Mile that leads to Holyrood Abbey. It felt a lot longer than a mile, but we got to see a lot of cool street performers and stopped at a million souvenir shops and listened to bagpipes and such :) It was a great taste of Scotland.

The tavern where we ate lunch, called Deacon Brodie's Tavern. It's actually named for the guy that Robert Louis Stevenson based "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" on. Brodie was a churchman by day, and a reckless gambler and womanizer by night. I don't know what happened to him, but the food here was good :)

I just walked the Royal Mile from Edinburgh Castle to Holyrood Palace!

Holyrood Palace, the Queen's official residence when she visits Scotland

I don't know if you can read the sign, but in a house just on the other side of this alley, the poet Robert Burns lived when he visited Edinburgh. Pretty amazing.

On our way back from Holyrood, we stopped for lunch and had a good time just hanging out there. Then we walked to rest of the way back to the train station - getting a little turned around in the mean time, but it turned out okay. We met our whole group and got on the...was it 4 or 5... o'clock train back to York. Apparently everyone else had the same idea, because there were very few seats for us to sit in, and some of us (me included) had to stand for probably half the trip until enough people got off that we could sit down. I was exhausted and it had been such a long week, so you can imagine that I wasn't in the best mood, but I was trying really hard :)

Also on the train was a cricket team that was drunk off their rockers. They were loud and crazy and cat-called us whenever we walked past. It was a little unsettling to have them so close. But we managed to stay out of their car for most of the trip, even though at one point one of them put on a hula skirt and coconut bra and went stumbling around the train. Oh, what asinine things alcohol can drive you to...

We finally got back to York, walked back to the hostel, and got in a good night's sleep before piling back into the van the next day and driving to Preston for a little church history sight-seeing on the way to Cardiff.

Pictures for Beaumaris Castle and Bryn Celli Ddu

So blogger isn't my best friend right now. It loads all the pictures to the top of the post, and dragging them all the way to the bottom to arrange them is a huge pain and taking way too long. So here are the pictures for the rest of my "Conwy and such" post. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Arriving at Beaumaris - say hello to the puffin!
Beaumaris Castle
The multiple portcullises
View up a fireplace on the second floor

Bryn Celli Ddu

Me and Zoe toasting our Gold Top milk on top of the mound
The entrance to the chamber from the main room

Entrance to the chamber
End of the chamber, but not quite an exit...

York

Forgive me for taking so long to get up a new post.  I hope to have all the rest of my trip documented, with photos and everything, by the end of this week, because I start classes next week!

Thursday, August 6th we drove from Conwy to a hostel in York, which is in north-central England.  It has a long history, with a particularly important role as the center of Viking culture in Britain from 800-1000ish.  There used to be a large and prosperous abbey called St. Mary's, but Henry VIII closed it down in the 1530s.  The town suffered for a while, but it's gotten better.  Charles I used a building we walked past as his headquarters during the Civil War, and Cromwell used York as his center for government in the north of England.

After a short walking tour with our whole group, we split up according to what we wanted to see there.  I and a few other girls were all still exhausted from our hike the previous day, so we walked to a park and enjoyed the nice weather by taking a short nap and doing some journaling.  Then we went on a kind of self-guided tour around the Shambles, a little street that nowadays has lots of cute shops and historic plaques, but used to be the street where all the butcher shops were.  It was pretty cool.  We also stopped at Greggs for some pasties (of course) and just took it easy after our demanding few days.

In the evening, some of us met up with a group to do a "Ghost Tour".  If you know me, it was a pretty gutsy move, but it turned out to not be so bad.  It had more historical curiosities than really creepy tales, and The Ghost Detective (the guy giving our tour) was really funny.  We stopped at a few places that I thought were interesting.  One was where an old workhouse/orphanage used to be, and the guy who ran it was nasty scum and basically didn't take care of the kids like he was supposed to, and when they died he would lie to the government to keep getting the money to take care of them.  Well, he was a heavy drinker too, and one night thought he could hear the dead children laughing at him.  He went kinda berserk, and you can fill in the rest.  Anyway, that used to be in the slums of York, and now that area is really well cleaned up and pretty and suburban-looking.  Another story that interested me was about The Plague House, where a rich merchant and his family lived.  He and his wife caught the plague, and the town found out and quarantined the house.  However, their little girl was one of those few people who is immune to the plague, though the townspeople didn't know that, and she lived for weeks by herself in that house.  Sad story.  We ended the tour at the Roman column discovered in an excavation of the area in the early 1900s, which of course is placed in the center of the town, right next to York Minster.  What they didn't really think about was the fact that the column was upside down.  Whoops.

After the tour was over, we wandered back to the hostel, where I discovered that everyone in my room was already there and already asleep - at 9:30 pm.   Awesome.  I tried to get to bed somewhat early, too, because we had to get up early to catch the train to Edinburgh on Friday!

Pictures

It seems that the last few times I've come to an internet cafe, the pictures have had a really hard time uploading. I'm really sorry. I'll keep trying, but I have no idea if it will work while I'm here. You may have to wait until I get back to Provo in two weeks :(

Snowdonia

Wednesday we drove to a wool museum to see how one of Wales’ most prominent industries is run. It was small and a little old-fashioned, but had some cool stuff. We had fun quoting North and South to each other as we watched the big machines carding and spinning the wool, even though the machines would be a little different for cotton.

"I have seen hell, and it is white. It is snow white..."

Later that morning we stopped at an old slate quarry that had been turned into a museum. We watched a demonstration by an old slate worker as he split and dressed the slate. It was so cool! It reminded me a lot of the blacksmith’s shop in Nauvoo, and the guy was so funny! One girl in our group was celebrating her birthday that day, so he made her a little heart out of the slate and then asked everyone else in the group if they wanted one, too. Of course, we all said yes, so he said we could buy them in the gift shop. Haha.He almost cut off her hand...
After the slate museum we took a lunch break and then started the hike up Snowdon, the highest mountain in the United Kingdom. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to make it to the top, but Tom seemed confident that we could make it. We partnered up so we could have someone with a similar pace, and started the ascent. Mount Snowdon is 1085 meters high, so it’s a pretty big climb. The first little bit was paved but really steep, and then it leveled out for a while. By that time we had lost the fast group in front of us and the slower group behind us, so it was just me and Elizabeth. We came across the “Halfway Café” and decided that it couldn’t be half way, it must be about 2/3 of the way, because we could see the summit and it wasn’t that far.

From about the Halfway Cafe, headed toward the summit in about the middle of the shot

Now I think it wasn’t even half way.

We're pretty sure that the hilltop ahead is where the summit is...It got really steep and rocky at that point, and we would only be able to go about 30 or 40 feet forward before we’d have to stop and rest again. I’ve never been so tired in my life. By the time we got to what we had thought was the summit, we could see that it was only about ¾ of the way, and we were dying. But we’d made it this far – we might as well make it to the top. So we kept pushing, but I didn’t have such nice things to say about Tom in the mean time.

At the top of that rounded hill, looking over to the REAL summit...

Finally, after 3 hours of steep climbing, we made it to the summit. It was beautiful, though the view was a little clouded over and we were freezing. We stopped in the little shop at the top and used the bathrooms, where I put my hands under the hand dryer like six times just to be able to feel them again. We each bought little “I hiked Snowdon” pins and some hot chocolate and ate some of the food we’d packed. Two other girls from our group got there about 30 minutes later and we rested with them, too. We stayed on top for about an hour total, dreading the climb down, but the four of us finally started. It only took us about 2 hours to get back down the mountain, and we were drained, but we had made it to the top and back! I actually had more energy at the bottom of the mountain than the top.

View on the way down, on a particularly steep partWe stopped at the sign on the way down to show our displeasure at the false advertisingTwo hours after we reached the bottom, my hands were still swollen

When we got back to the parking lot we found a plaque talking about the mountain and the hike and telling us that the route we had taken was the longest and most gradual climb to the summit. Hard to believe considering some of the inclines we braved, but when I saw that the trail up and back totaled 9 miles, I felt much better. However, if I had known how long it was beforehand, I probably wouldn’t have tried to go all the way. Nine miles uphill is really tough, especially if you’re as out of shape as I am.

So proud of ourselves!At the very top of Mount Snowdon!!!

But it was well worth it, even though my legs are still sore five days later : )