Long Weekend: Wales Visit #2 (Betws-y-Coed, Caernarfon Castle, Greenwood Forest Park)

The last couple of blog posts reflect a theme that we have been hitting our vacations a bit weary.  This one was no exception.  We've been up and down for a few months now about  whether or not to extend our stay in the UK until July 2016.  It's not an easy decision to make, and unfortunately the pros and cons don't point strongly in one direction.  The week before this trip to Wales was the final scramble through the approval cycle to find out if we had permission to stay.  We hit the road at 4 pm on Friday.  At 5 pm I got a phone call.  "Hi Shawn, I just heard from the program(me) director, who just talked with the head of HR.  Your extension is approved."  Considering that the deadline to get approvals was Friday or else we would need to get the US relocation process started the following week, this really came down to the wire.

The uncertainty about whether we would be able to extend has taken a toll on the family - especially on the three older ones (fortunately Charis and Clare have been mostly unaffected).  With all that hanging over our heads, there was something healing about driving into the cottage near Betws-y-Coed where we stayed last year for the same bank holiday weekend in May.  Sheep are not a particularly calming or refreshing site.  But the landscape surrounding the farm which houses the sheep (and our cottage) is amazing.  

It did not take Elise long to curl up in the window of the dining room with a book to read.

Like daughter, like mother.

Rain kept us in our cottage for most of Saturday.  This provided the time away from home to relax that I think we needed.  We did have some excitement at the local swimming pool.  It involved Clare walking farther into the deep end than she realized, and Elise lifting her up before Kristine and I did.  Clare swallowed a little water, and Elise's hair hurt from being pulled.  Otherwise all was well.  

It got me thinking about how much the girls have grown in the year since our last visit to the cottage.  The hilly landscape, while beautiful, is - well - hilly.  Last year Clare got carried quite a bit, and Charis made the walks with lots of encouragement.  This year all three girls cheerfully ran through the fields as they chased sheep, and then back up the road when they were done.  

The farm has a couple of chickens who were gracious enough to wander out of the pasture and next to our cottage.  Cue squeals of laughter as the girls took chase.

Another sign of growth was the difference in card games.  Last year's trip involved the stuffed animals playing Dutch Blitz.  This year Clare joined in and "helped" the adults.  This meant we played Dutch Blitz as a family for the first time.  Elise and Charis and I also pulled out Monopoly.  If you look in the photo, Charis's side of the board is the only one with cash.  Somehow she missed the memo that the parent is supposed to win a new game, at least for the first few times it's played.  She landed on Free Parking several time, built hotels on one set, and promptly had both Elise and I land on them.  

Sunday morning we braved the drizzle and made the 45 min drive up to Caernarfon Castle. The castle is a physically imposing structure - one of the many castles which Edward I built to try and establish military control over Wales.  It's also a symbolically important site.  According to tradition, Edward I tried legitimize his status as an outside ruler by connecting himself with the legend that Magnus, emperor or Rome, dreamt of and eventually married the Welsh princess Elen and ruled from Caernarfon.  Legend has it that the tradition of the male heir to the crown having the title Prince of Wales began with Edward II's birth at the castle.  

The dias in the background is where Prince Charles's was invested as Prince of Wales. 

We had some morale problems when we first arrived at the castle.  Upon after-action-review, consensus was the issue was boredom on arrival.  We made several attempts to encourage cheerfulness.  Attempt #1: paternal lecture about how boredom is a choice. Not so well received.

We tried getting a photo, but someone was a little grumpy

We did some exploring of dark hallways.  Someone was still grumpy.

Attempt #2: take turns having each person in the family pick a door in the castle to enter and explore.  This helped.  The castle has lots of doors, stairways, and dark hallways to explore.  The dark hallways sparked the girls' imaginations.  They started commenting about how the hallways and rooms were positively Nancy Drew-ish (code for place where interesting and sometimes scary things can happen).  In one particular room, the exhibit about Magnus and Elen was accompanied by haunting music playing in the room and adjoining hallways.  These ghostly voices were scary in a fun sort of way (e.g., you've got to get away from them, but you also know they're singing near a doorway so if you pretend you're lost later on, all you have to do is follow the voices).

Peek-a-boo!

Attempt #3: have the girls write a story involving the castle.  This turned the morale corner.  The story took a while to percolate, and then evolved through the twists and turns of the hallways and stairs that we explored.  It wound up involving an Irish king who wanted to invade South America, a Welsh king at Caernarfon whose helped he requested via carrier pigeons, and soldiers who had to translate because they spoke Irish (the language of the message carried by the pigeons) and the Welsh king didn't.  Once the soldiers decide the invasion is a bad idea, convince their king to decline, the other fellow gets angry and decides to invade Caernarfon instead, the opportunities for interesting twists and turns in the story are almost as endless as the unexplored stairs and hallways in the castle.

Town of Caernarfon viewed from the castle

Very little ground has been built up around the castle in the centuries since it was built.  This makes its structure that much more imposing.

Come quick!  I found the ocean!

Another sign of family growth - everyone handled the stairs without complaining or getting tired

There is sanctioned climbing (stairs).  There is also creative climbing (anything else).  We allowed creative climbing as long as we started from the ground.

The story reached a climax at this point.  I think they were climbing to escape.

One room had a chess board with key figures from Welsh history (red) and English history (white) whose paths crossed at Caernarfon.  I decided Edward I could be my friend after confirming that I was taller than his statue.

We finished our visit to the castle in good spirits

Although the chance to be grumpy was too good to pass up

Visit to Caernarfon complete, spirits revived, bodies nourished with lunch at Wal, we made a short trip up the road to Greenwood Forest Park.  The Wales guidebook described it as follows: If you have children, take them.  If you don't have some children, rent some and take them.  Fortunately for us, the slight drizzle from the morning cleared up and the afternoon gave us pleasant weather to enjoy exploring the activities in the park.  Our first stop, the Green Dragon, was the girls' first exposure to a roller coaster that was not miniature Indiana State Fair-ish.  It was a large enough roller coaster to be authentic, but small enough that Kristine and I didn't wimp out when excited girls loved their ride and asked for a second one (and third, and fourth, and ...).

Many of the park's activities are premised on people contributing energy to do something - climb a hill so you can lift an empty roller coaster while you ride down in a car and then climb another hill to ride the roller coaster.  Or pull your own sledge up a shorter hill that you can then ride down.  There's certainly an educational and environmentally conscious component to this.  There's also a very intelligent "handling children with energy" component.  Give them fun things to do which they enjoy and get excited about, and then channel that excitement by making them work to earn their fun.

We spent lots of time at this hill.  Distance and photographic skill prevented giving their smiles full credit.

Smiles and excitement properly captured.

More excitement and smiles.

One area of the park, called "Den Building," is just for building wooden shelters.  You can pick up branches (some of which have had branches stripped by the rangers) from the ground to build your own den.  You can also take apart someone else's den if you want to use their branches for your own building project.  You have to build your den by laying branches against each other.  How you do that is up to you, within constraints of which tree or trees you use as a starting point.  Our structure was pretty standard.  The girls likely didn't notice or care.  They had lots of fun hauling wood, and delegated structure design to the parents.

Village of toadstools - great place for posing, climbing, and pretending to be fairies.

The flyer said the park closed at 5:30 pm.  We obviously took that time too literally.  By 5 pm it was pretty much empty and the staff were putting things away.  Fortunately, stilts don't qualify as kit that needs to be put away.  We grabbed a few minutes trying to walk - or at least balance - on stilts before heading back to the cottage.  Where Charis put Elise and I out of our Monopoly misery.

On Monday morning we made one more stop at the swimming pool.  Clare stated emphatically that she would not go into the deep end.  She did however cheerfully play with floats in the shallow end (that and make friends with another little girl who she is convinced would just love to invite us over to her house the next time we visit Wales). (with no adventures from Clare this time).  We wrapped up our time in Wales with a short hike at Conwy Falls.  

View of the river from above the falls. 

Charis is happy.  She just swindled me into swapping my cheese sandwich for her PB&J one. 

Photo op X.  Everyone's looking at the phone without squinting at the sun.  Salmon ladder for the falls is in a tunnel to the right of the tree.

Photo op X + 1. Kind hiker offered to take a photo but the sun got the better of us.

The sign at the viewpoint for the falls said that hikers were not allowed to go down to the water due to dangerous currents.  Naturally we obeyed this.  After all, no self-respecting 9 yr old would go looking for paths to the water that aren't blocked off by a fence.  No self-respecting father would encourage her explorations, and then follow her down to the water.

The hike was short, but involved some pretty decent elevation changes.  Clare did a bang-up job walking.  She needed a bit of encouragement toward the end, but did well enough that we're dreaming of a family hike up Mt. Snowdon if we make another visit to this area next May.

The map said there was a fallen tree to climb on.  We couldn't find it.  We did find this little cave to climb on.

My final reflection about our trip is this poster from the wall of Elise's bedroom at the cottage.  We had a long conversation about it when we Friday.

Daddy, what does that poster mean?
Well, sometimes things happen that you're not happy about.  You can choose to be miserable, or you can choose to look for a positive in the experience.
You mean like us staying in the UK for a year?

Like I said at the beginning of this post, asking to extend was not easy decision.  And as of the end of this post, writing about a week later, we don't actually know if it will happen.  Turns out the approval to extend was based on changing our contract in ways that hadn't been discussed with us or my sponsoring project beforehand.  We're going through another negotiation loop to see if the extension will be approved on the original terms.  If not, then the lemons will be an unfortunate experience of bureaucratic decision-making, and the lemonade will be the positives about returning to the US as originally planned.