Mountains and Flooded Caves

Danger is my middle name. Well not really it is nothing like it actually. But it is a fun thing to say. But while my middle name isn’t anything out of the ordinary I do like to go on the occasional adventure. In fact I am a bit of an explorer of sorts, I always want to see what is around the next corner, down the next block, in the cave, behind a door, etc. It really doesn’t even matter what I find, as long as I get to find it. My lovely wife is also an adventurer and explorer. She just gets a bored and tired before I usually do, but even then she tends to be a good sport about things. Recently this even meant hair raising racing through treacherous mountain roads and fording a cold, wet, underground river recently. And for a change I am not even exaggerating about that.

It happened in Wales. One of our recent road trips was to Manchester, Liverpool, through Snowdonia to Swansea, and then back to home sweet home away from home Portsmouth. But I am starting at the end so should work the right way through. We started our day in a nice Country Club Hotel outside of Manchester run by Marriott (gotta love the points). We drove through northern Wales stopping at a site or two and seeing some incredibly beautiful scenery. Halfway through the day we stopped in a little town and walked across a cool old suspension bridge, visited a modern armory, and walked along an old town wall. After this we stopped at a mansion that was built around in the early to mid 1800’s that was made to look like a Norse castle. It was pretty cool and as usual I got yelled at for trying to sneak some photos from inside. Then it was time to head through the Mountains towards the south and our next hotel.

The Mountains in Snowdonia aren’t that tall. The highest peek in the region is Snowdon at 3600 ft. But the mountains are certainly different looking. They are mostly covered in yellow green grass, except where they open to show great displays of grey brown rock. We could not see the tops of the mountains do to the weather and mist that surrounded everything. The trees are not all pines as you see in the Alps or Rockies, but also include maples, oaks, and birches. We passed many a lake and stream and much of the road we traveled was a lot like a tunnel. Where trees on both sides of the road had grown together to block out a lot of the sun. Most of the roads were barely big enough for a single car, yet we had bidirectional traffic. I have dealt with this before but in flat or only semi hilly farm fields. This added another dimension of fun as many of the roads had a very noticeable decline or incline. In fact at some points it felt like we were driving into the mist, through a tunnel of trees, with trucks coming at us, strait up a mountain. Yes, driving in the US is going to super easy when I get home, the British are nutz. Or in this case Welsh I guess.

The hairy drive through the mountains was actually the least of our adventure though. After a night in a hotel in Swansea we decided to go to coast for a little hike. We got to the coast, but the 50 mile an hour winds and rain made us change our plans to have lunch and look out the windows at the coast instead. So then we went to a place that I thought would be more indoors the National Cave Center. This place has 3 caves, a petting zoo, some ancient stone circles, a replica of an Iron Age farm, and a bunch of plaster dinosaurs. This place would make any 1950s US road side attraction, AKA Tourist Trap, owner proud. It was actually pretty fun, we walked through several caves, looked at the farm and dinosaurs, and checked of 2/3s of the attractions. The funniest thing about the cave is in true British fashion they had loud speakers playing a track making you feel like you were there when the caves were first explored along with a few fake people hanging around in scenes to show the way it was. Pretty cheesey stuff. Not really the stuff most adventures are made from.

That is until we went into the last cave, a very large and long cave that contains a waterfall. It is called the wedding cave, as the rent it out for weddings. When we first walked into the cave there was ½ of inch of water across the foot path. The water was coming from a small stream to the left of the path and was draining on the other side of the path. In fact it looks like the path was built over the stream and its level had just rose a bit. Undeterred we continued along. We noticed that the waterfall that supplied the river was quite larger than we thought and we had to use our umbrellas to continue along the path that when by it. After several minutes we made it to the back of the cave, which was full of the strange combined melody of a wedding march and rushing waterfall. I could see how it might be cool to have a ceremony there, but it would be impossible to stay clean and dry. We looked around for a bit then headed out. When we reached the exit of the cave, that same river had actually come up a foot or more and created a lake. We couldn’t even figure out where the path had been.

After a couple of minutes of thing we may be able to go along the wall or find the edge of the path we gave up. Figuring it was only going to get worse before it got better we forded the weather. This soaked up in COLD mountain water up to our knees. It was not pleasant. And being that we were 4-5 hours from home it was not the happy situation. It was kind of funny though poking my umbrella in the water to find my way through the mini lake in the cave. When we did get out we saw drain next to the cave. It was flowing so little when we went in we didn’t notice it. Now it was a raging torrent. All was not lost however. Luckily we both had extra shoes and clothes in the car. So we were able to get somewhat dry before completing our long drive back to the apartment.