On today’s 11.5-mile hike down into a valley, up its length up to a minor pass and then down into a neighboring valley, I was thinking about trail conversation. As any screenwriter or playwright will tell you, real conversation is filled with false starts, responses that overlap and don’t respond, and a bunch of filler. So often, we aren’t talking to efficiently convey or debate ideas, but rather to engage with other people.

On the trail, the conversation falls into a few general types of gambit.

The social wellness check: Because walking together is about adjusting your own habits to align with someone else’s, including how fast you walk, how often you stop, what you stop for, and for how long, there’s just a lot of getting everyone aligned and making sure it is going okay. I’ve noted that Tracy and I, more than Tim, deploy self-deprecation as a tactic on the check-in. “You know me, I always blaze ahead on the uphill. Should someone else lead?” “I’m sorry, I’m weirdly slow on rocky downhill bits.” (both actual examples from this walk) The question of pace recurs. The stops and starts are often negotiated in a more subtle mix of verbal cues and body language. One of us will get distracted by the desire to take a photo (me), or explore a ruin (Tim), and there’s a bit of back and forth before you hear things like “Yeah, that’s cool. Well…”, often accompanied by a bit of walking pole adjusting or simply moving ahead on the trail. There’s also some of the more direct “Is this pace good?”

The ooh and aah: Unsurprisingly, a lot of trail utterance is just remarking on the amazing scenery, or the incredible, inconceivable volumes of slate tailings that are dumped all over the landscape of Snowdonia. This is sometimes not even conversation, but just an isolated utterance, but a fair amount of the time, there’s a bit of back and forth. “Look at the size of these slate scrap piles!” “It makes me feel small in a weird way.”

Speculation: I suppose some walkers will have really read the materials in the guide carefully, and perhaps even have done further background reading. I’ve done a bit, but am mostly depending on random trivia I’ve picked up over the years to fill in the gaps. So we’ll be looking at a lake and wondering “Is that naturally occurring, or did they damn it up? If so, was it for farming or part of the slate industry?

The advantage of walking with other people is that sometimes someone else can fill in a blank in your knowledge. So while I know about Welsh animosity to the English, for instance, Tim can identify pieces of farm equipment (from living in Maine) and can talk about the digitalis in foxglove and its medical applications.

And in some cases the speculation is just fun. What the heck happened that someone abandoned this little van right near some houses, and it just stayed there long enough for weeds to grow up inside the van?

Tim, who Tracy lovingly says sometimes has the spirit of a ten-year-old, is the most open and enthusiastic in his curiosity and speculation. So when we see a weird piece of metal bolted into a ruin, he wants to stop and examine it and try to work out through reasoning what it was for. “It’s connected with bolts, and there’s something sort of like a handle…” I come for a more whimsical approach, seeing something odd on the trail and tossing out a theory, however absurd. Sometimes I prove to be right, but sometimes it’s just a good laugh. Which leads us to…

Jokes: On this trip, a fair bit of our trail conversation has been the ongoing hilarity of our inability to pronounce or even retain Welsh place names. I am sure this tiny little village (three houses, full stop) is not pronounced “Drowsy Co-ed,” but we sure got a laugh out of it.

And how many l’s can there be in a name? The Llwybr Llyn Llywelyn Walk. Really?

Mapping: Obviously, a good bit of our conversation is devoted to deciphering the trail. “Is that the path through the middle of the bracken?” “There’s a waymarker up there at the top of the meadow!” “Are we sure this is still the trail?” (That last one is crucial, and regularly leads to consultation with the OS app or the guidebook when the trail has gone on for a while without a waymarker.)

Memories/reflections: Because we’ve all hiked together before in Switzerland, we have a shared set of hiking memories, and of course Tracy and I have an extensive bank of shared walking experience (Coast to Coast Path, South Downs Way, Hadrian’s Wall), so there’s a lot of remembering things like our old joke about “downward-facing sheep.” (sheep sometimes lower their front legs and graze in a position that looks a lot, to us at least, like downward-facing dog yoga pose. We remember other trails, compare and contrast, and help each other remember old stories of the trail.

Chitchat: Obviously, sometimes we are just talking about our lives, our friends, things we’ve done. So, triggered by something on the path, I’ll talk about a play I saw, Tracy and Tim will tell me about something that happened to them recently. And we’ll fill in little gaps. I now know more than I did last week about what my niece Rachel and my nephew Dan are doing these days.

So, I’ll summaraize the day, and you can imagine the three of us shifting among these conversational modes as we go. We were, you will recall from yesterday, staying in a fancy hotel in Caernarfon. We needed a taxi pickup. We were gunning for the early side (8:30) but when I called from the hotel in the evening to set up the morning pickup, they were a bit flustered, because they’d assumed 9:30, which is what people mostly want. She told me she’d try to get the driver to do his first pieces of driving (the taxis are also hauling luggage and doing heaven knows what– delivering food orders for all I know) quickly and he might get to us between 9 and 9:30. Which of course meant he arrived at 9:45, and we got dropped back at our trail later than I would have liked, But he was an interesting guy, and helped us understand the extent to which many Welsh really aren’t good at English. He was, but he said most of his friends couldn’t carry on a conversation in English. The Welsh animosity for the English runs deep, and has persisted over centuries.

We got to our start, headed down into the valley, and then walked the valley floor doing a lot of oohing and aahing before ascending to a saddleback to get out of this valley and into the next. Then there was a long stretch of forest walking before we stopped for lunch at a little train station (which provided a nice bench with back support, which Tim rightly suggested would be nice) with about five miles left to walk. I took out my rain jacket and we confirmed the extent to which the inner lining is flaking away. This will be the jacket’s last trip. It was shedding big Post-it note sizes flakes of the lining. When I took it off, my arms were covered in smaller flakes. Very attractive. No wonder this jacket doesn’t keep me very dry.

The last five miles were on a lovely gravel path where we passed a herd of kids on bicycles (maybe 30 all told) supervised by four or five adults. Then we wove our way down to Beddgelert, passing over small-gauge railroad tracks a number of times as we zigzagged down. And right before town, we saw a train at a station.

Our hotel is small, and Beddgelert is apparently a bit of a destination for tourists, but fortunately the hotel has a small dining room behind the public bar that is only for guests, so we didn’t have to worry about finding a place to sit to eat. Delicious dinner, with some worried conversation about tomorrow’s 100% rain forecast. It’s a 14.5 mile day with hard ascents. We shall see.