Week end in Wales: Thursday 

Are going to sleep in the car?

My friends L., Y., E. , his sister C. and I went to visit Wales the last weekend. Herein, is the description  of our trip from the notes I have been taking. 

We left the university Thursday eve around 18h30 heading for Wales, obviously, the roads were very busy but we managed to quickly progress toward the bordure. Our first destination was the Youth hostel build at the feet of Snowdon Ranger, the highest peak of England and Wales with an impressive 1068 m. (On the map, it is between Bangor and Ffestiniog). It sounds like a small mountain, but actually the whole Snowdonia National park is really mountainous. At the time, I couldn't really tell anything about the mountain's edge, because it was night and snow started to fall. Snow has been forecast by weather program but we were surprised. The surprise get even higher when we realised the amount of snow that was surrounding us and more dramatically coating the road with a slippery duvet. We had planned to reach the hostel by 9pm, but were lost far from Snowdon at this time. The Welsh road signs are almost worst that French one, even if you manage to overcome the Welsh language, so we were always very reluctant to choose a direction, thus we were damn slow compare to our plan. 

So, the snow was falling, we were driving through small towns with unpronounceable name, and I was stacked with Y. and C. sleeping on both side whereas I was unable to shut my eyelid. Funnily, I wanted to use this week end as a detox to my JoeUser addiction, but the only thing I could think of was writing new posts.  Listening to Ben Harper, the Doors and a few others while we were immerged in the obscurity constituted a fertile environment for in-depth though.

A big issue was, would the YH staff will be waiting for us until we arrived, they were supposed to close the door at 22:30pm. We managed to phone them and to make them wait, 30 minutes after we had to repeat it. The road was so steep and full of snow that E. had to drive at 5 mph for 20 minutes. I was thinking that we might have to sleep in the car but the road went clear and we managed to quickly arrive to the Youth Hostel at 23h30. There was a little more that 20 cm of snow there and the clerk was everything except happy. We brought our pack inside and  got relax by having a little appetitive with Belgian beers and chorizo. It was excellent. The week end was looking really promising. 

My friends went to bed , I imitated them after writing down some notes and fell peacefully asleep with the very loud snoring of E..

Map from LonelyPlanet.com

England and Wales Youth Hostels web page