It was a simple plan. Walk 14.5 miles, rain or shine, and get through one of the two longest-distance days of the trail.

Plans, as they say, change.

We’d had a very nice evening. Our hotel proprietress had very kindly let us in at 3pm, the time our travel company said the rooms would be available, even though she was clearly just back from shopping (it’s a tiny hotel, a husband and wife operation with some staff, but small enough that they just lock up in the middle of the day to get things done). Tim and Tracy have been carrying a bottle of Maine maple syrup that was meant as a gift for friends they saw before meeting up with me. They’d forgotten to give it to their friends, and were waiting for a good B&B host to leave it with as a gift. We’d ruled out hotels, but after our early welcome and the way they said they were willing to start breakfast service early for us, T&T agreed that this was the place. So it was a happy evening. But it was raining.

And raining.

And raining.

I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of heavy rain, and, in my usual compulsive planning way, looked up the bus routes that could take us from Beddgelert to Llan Ffestiniog, our next stop. It could be done in a few hours with just two buses, one down to a bigger town down by the sea and one back up into the mountains. Early in the morning, while writing my blog (I go to bed early and blog the previous day at 5am), I recorded this out my window.

I was honestly nervous that Tim and Tracy would want to hike nonetheless, being of hearty Maine spirit, so I was bracing myself for the longest, wettest hike imaginable. My boots have mostly lost their waterproofing, and there is nothing more unpleasant and tiring than hiking in boots that are squishing with water. (It ups your chance of blisters, too.)

To my great relief, they too had been researching options, and breakfast was a conference of decision-making. My two-bus idea was clearly tempting, but Tim had a found a little town about 9 miles into the hike that we could call a taxi to take us to, cutting out the biggest elevation gain and loss that start this segment of the route. Tracy, I could see, was leaning toward two buses, but Tim and I both really wanted to get at least some hiking in, just to say that when Wales gave us rain, we saw what it was like to hike in it. Despite things like hearing other breakfasting guests report that some roads might be flooded out, majority and insaner heads prevailed, and we called our luggage transport company for the day (Contours, my travel company, contracts out to local taxi and hauling companies) to see if we could also get a ride to Tanygriseau.

Lucky thing we did; the man I called said grumpily that he doesn’t service Beddgelert and Tanygriseau. We were puzzled, thought we might have misunderstood the taxi hire list, so I handed off and Tracy called the taxi company for our next leg, causing much short term panic. They definitely had us down for luggage hauling for tomorrow and the next day, but nothing today. Uh oh. Tracy, acting smartly, kept them on the phone and asked them to do a taxi ride for us today at noon (we were hoping the weather would ease up, which… um… sort of?). Tracy very kindly continued to do crisis management and called Contours, explaining our situation and calls. They seemed as puzzled as we about the guy they had listed for today. We left them to sort that out, and settled in for a long morning of reading in the lobby of this little country hotel while the two cleaning staff got their work done all around us.

While we waited, a man arrived, looked at us and said “Sartin?” Yes. He’d come to collect the luggage, and was now wondering if he was supposed to get us too. He was not John the taxi guy who was supposed to do it. It was another taxi service that got a last-minute call from Contours after we alerted them to the potential service gap. He’d been free, fortunately, and would deliver our bags, but we explained that we had a car coming in a few hours.

Eventually, after a lot of reading, a lot of looking out at the rain, and a little intermittent dozing, our taxi arrived/ The driver gave us some great conversation about the rules of driver’s licenses and points on licenses and why he observes the speed limit, which he definitely did, much to our pleasure on this wet day on mostly tiny roads. He dropped us at a little parking area, clearly created for hikers who do day trips, in Tanygriseau, and off we went, feeling a mix of self-congratulation at our intrepid spirit, concern at how flooded many fields in lower parts of the drive had looked, and knowledge that, one way or another, we were walking these 5.5 miles.

It wasn’t raining as heavily as it had been earlier, but it was so misty and drippy that we were soon wet. This was the first day that Tracy and I wore gaiters over our boots to try to keep out some of the wet. Tim has been wearing them most of the time, and as a result he’s gotten less scratched up on his shins. I don’t really like the feeling of gaiters, but today it seemed wise.

We hiked through a grassy bit, over to another road and into Blaenau Ffestiniog, a bigger town to the north of Llan Ffestiniog. Towns are often tricky for signage, because they’ll just throw a little sign on the side of a building, or not mark a turn at all, or mark it with a generic “walking path” sign. So we had a few hesitations before leaving a street and plunging down a slippery trail through some trees and ferns and rocks and mud. There were a few missteps, a few near stumbles, but on we went. And the misty, spitting rain continued. And we hiked on. The trail hit a brief patch of road, then went off onto a farm track and soon was climbing off the track into fields along fence lines.

As though the gods of trail-making wanted this part to be hard, the path become less well-marked. My phone was increasingly hard to open because when it’s wet it becomes more reluctant to get past the fingerprint ID mode and let me use a passcode to open it. Tim had his phone, also with the app, in a drysack, which has a window of some sort of plastic that can transmit your touch to the phone, so his was the better phone for wayfinding, but his phone has a weird problem that the arrow that marks your position doesn’t orient correctly on his phone, so we had some firm debates, as my normal equanimity started to fray, about which direction to go. By this point Tracy was irritable, I was sliding that way, and Tim, ever the tranquil spirit, was still in good spirits. God bless him for keeping us from just sitting down in the wet and yelling at each other.

And on we trekked, reminding ourselves that we were very brave and that this was an experience. But every time we saw a river or stream, we were reminded that this is more than normal Welsh weather. This is one of the two or three really big rains they get in late summer that cause flooding.

Turn on the sound for this video!

We hadn’t really looked closely at the end of the day’s hike, and Tim had said we were basically going down into town. I had a vague suspicion that the last mile was in fact up, so there was a bit of back and forth about that (those who have seen me when I’m at the end of my patience can imagine how I sounded– like a grumpy jerk). Alas, I was correct, and Tracy and I squished and squelched up the hill that never ends. Tim has the good fortune to have basically brand new boots, the waterproofing of which is still in full force, so he was drier that either of us. We made our way into Llan Ffestiniog looking like drowned rats, and walked down a larger, slightly scary road with basically nowhere to walk but in the lane of traffic (only a few cars, but still…) and arrived at our hotel, the Gwestry Seren, which is actually a pretty cool place. It’s been renovated inside and out to accommodate individuals with disabilities and their families, so that a family with a child, say, with learning disabilities and some physical challenges can have a nice place to stay for a holiday. A really good idea in a country where most places outside Cardiff make no accommodation for anything.

For a 5.5-mile walk, this was a ridiculously hard day.

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