August 4 - Friday
We were up and packed without incident. We weren't in a big hurry knowing we had less than 30 miles to go but we did know that it would be pretty hilly before we got to the valley and to the town near CAT called Machynllyth. It was a sunny day and before long we had passed the borders of Snowdonia National Park. It was beautiful country side - scenery I've enjoyed the most so far. My bike gears had gotten a little temperamental lately - not shifting smoothely and falling off the ring on occasion when I drop all the way down into grannygear. We rode through the occasional small village but it was a lot of hillside or sloping fields. Lots of cows and lots of sheep.
We had been forewarned about the "mountains" we would have to climb to get to CAT but by the time we were heading back downhill we were still looking for them. Mind you it wasn't flat roads we had been travelling on to get there but it wasn't like we were climbing over the Cascade Mountians back home in Washington. We pulled into Macnyllyth in early afternoon and got our camping ground information before taking a look around the town. The area is popular for many outdoor activities, one of which is mountain biking. You got the vibe that this was an outdoorsy town. We ate lunch which was actually their all day breakfast at a local café. I went into a couple of shops and we stopped by the whole food store run by CAT for some homemade ice cream. We also found the town bike shop and bought another water bottle to replace the one Jon left at The Open. So far we've only had to replace two waterbottles which I think is doing pretty good. At any rate, the owner told us about a bike trail that would take us right up to CAT. I checked and double checked to make sure that he understood that we were on fully loaded touring bikes and if it would still be ok for us to ride on the trail and he assured us it would be. So we took his instructions and hit the trail.
There were a couple gates to walk the bikes through and other than one really, really, massive hill it was nice and quiet. It was just a couple miles before we were at CAT and our campground was very close by.
The name of the place was something in Welsh - all I remember about it is not having a clue how to pronounce it, a lot of N's, L's and W's with maybe a Y thrown in to really confuse things. It also had the word Farm in the title and sure enough, it was/is a farm.
We weren't sure if we were in the right place or not as it looked like a private residence until we saw the registration sign pointing toward the house. I walked into the livingroom and kitchen area of the owner and paid my £8 to the daughter who said we could pitch our tent anywhere. I walked back out to Jon and past the family dog (a black lab) who I gave a good belly rub to after he slowly slid to the ground and went belly up after I first started petty behind his ears. Looking expectantly at me with his paws up and belly ready for rubbing - how could I refuse?!
Behind the house and down a short steep hill we camped in a field next to a stream. There was another field near ours which was still being used as for sheep grazing. Showers and dishwashing sinks had been built into what must have been the basement of the house. A little rough around the edges but do-able. The toilets were pretty clean but there was no way my feet were going to touch the floor of that shower!
We quickly set up camp and
Oh wait, did I mention we had homemade ice cream at the whole foods store in town? The store is run by CAT and they make their own ice cream. I had the Celtic Crunch which was a sweet cream/vanilla ice cream with bits of crunchy things in it which I can only guess would be a Celt! Jon had something with Chocolate, coffee, and cherries which I knew he wouldn't really enjoy because there wasn't enough chocolate in it but I'm glad he tried something different if only to confirm what he really likes!
Anyway. After we set up our tent we hightailed it to CAT which was just a short 5 minute walk away. We walked up to the ticket booth and asked to woman behind the counter if she would let us go in without paying the fee since there was less than two hours left before they closed. You had to ride an elevator in order to actually get onto the premises, displays, information, restaurant and book/gift store. We were lucky because she let us in. We stepped into the elevator and the woman explained what was involved. The elevator is run by a water and weight system. There are two elevators with holding tanks. One elevator at the top and one at the bottom. As you're waiting in the bottom elevator the top elevator's holding take fills until it just surpasses the weight of your elevator down at the bottom once that happens the weight of the top elevator carries it down as the bottom elevator that you're on goes up. It's cool.
We closed down the place. The staff kept reminding the group of stragglers that included ourselves that the last elevator down was at 6pm. We were really excited. This place was a goldmine! They had some great books but we really tried to keep ourselves from going buck wild and getting a lot of books because:
A. We didn't want to carry them all on our bikes.
B. We didn't want to pay a lot of money for postage to send them home.
We got a few books and made note of the ones published in America that we would look into getting once we were back home. We took our treasures and went back to camp. It was just beginning to rain as we walked to our campsite so we set up a little sitting area in our tent and started to devour our new books! We were thrilled to actually have information about the things of interest to us in regards to building our house: solar, hydro, wind energy, strawbale and rammed earth building. I was looking at permaculture gardening, dairying and cheesemaking, solar cooking, dehydrating, and food storage. The rain kept coming and we weren't into cooking dinner so we had dinner from a can and kept looking at our books until bed time. The plan for tomorrow was to be at CAT when the doors opened - we were psyched!
