What You Don't Know....

It's been raining for forty days. We arrived in the pretty mountain town of Llanberis, North Wales in a rain that came lashing in from every direction. Coming across the hotel parking lot was like being in a car wash. We couldn't see Snowdon, the mountain that we were going to climb, and it's pretty big. We could barely see the hotel.

The next day the sun came out.

At 3000 feet, Snowdon Mountain is the highest mountain in Wales, which you wouldn't think is saying much - that's less than a mile, the old, ground-down, gentle Blue Ridge are about 3000 feet tall. Plus, Snowdon's clambered over by 500,000 people every year: school groups, toddlers, people in flip-flops. But, as in most things, there are two ways to get to the top: the easy way: a lovely, lake-side stroll and then broad steps up the last 1000 feet.



And then there's the hard way, which means crawling along a ridge called Crib Goch, or Red Comb, made of thousands of rocks the size and shape of hooves and good for grabbing onto and hauling yourself through crevices and notches, but hard on the knees. Some people trot along the ridge in sneakers and stretch pants and make big sighing noises when they have to go around a pile of clinging mortals.





But we just went along until, as you do when you just go along, we got to the top. There's your boy waving from the top of Wales.

And then we walked down the lovely, lake-side, path down broad steps.
and ate McVitie's Plain Chocolate Digestives biscuit cookies and raisins. Although our most gruesome injury was a blackened toe nail,

the whole thing was a little nerve-wracking especially to guard-dog B, who managed to persevere while simultaneously imagining all of us shooting off into the cloud and rocks far below.



But then, there's Scotland....