Travelling.

Yesterday we caught a bus to the Oldham Mumps tram stop, a tram to Victoria, another tram to Piccadilly, a train to Chester, another train to Bangor, and finally a bus to Caernarfon.

It’s amazing how complicated it can be at Piccadilly station to find out which platform you want if you are not going to the final destination on a train journey. So you have to discover that your train to Chester is going on to I don’t remember where now and that your train to Bangor is in fact going on the Holyhead.

However, on the final train I found out that Holyhead is called Caerbrelig in Welsh. Later I discovered that Caer means fort. So presumably Holyhead has a castle as well as Caernarfon, or at least had one at some time. Caernarfon’s is very impressive.

We had been assured that we could catch a bus from Bangor to Caernarfon. What we had not been told was that you had to leave the station and walk around the corner to the bus stop. But we are enterprising grown-up people and were able to ask a local.

Our next discovery was that English old-buddy bus-passes cannot be used on Welsh buses. Nor apparently can Welsh old-biddy bus-passes be used on English buses. So much for a United Kingdom!

The bus to Caernarfon (£3.50 each) took us on a tour of the outer bits of Bangor, announcing each of the approaching stops in both Welsh and English, and eventually dropped us in what was called the Caernarfon bus station. More of a line of bus shelters really but there you go.

Then all we had to do was find the Black Boy pub, where we were meeting some old friends and booking into a boarding house.

Yesterday evening 8 old friends sat in the restaurant of the Black Boy, the oldest pub in Wales according to the blurb and ate copious amounts of food.

Today we all went for a ride on the Welsh Highland Railway to Porthmadog, a splendid trip on a steam train. The scenery was excellent and the sun shone for us. (Photos will appear perhaps tomorrow.) There we had a drink and a snack and caught the train back again.

A little bit smutty perhaps but not bad for a reunion of old friends from the 1960s!