Today it´s time to leave Manchester. It´ss our last breakfast at Tarlsco House and it is, well, still English. We´re getting tired of English breakfasts now. The first cook has returned. He hasn´t escaped.

We left Manchester by bus traveling through Liverpool towards northern Wales. We went through a long tunnel under the river Mersey and arrived at Birkenhead. That´s where Peter fell asleep. He woke up again near the Welsh border. we went through places like Connah´s Quay (where a man had killed himself and his family a couple of days earlier according to the news), Rhyl, Prestatyn and Colwyn Bay. When we arrived to the seaside town Llandudno we had to change bus. We stepped out of the first one but couldn´t see the one we had to continue with.

Llandudno in northern Wales.

We had to wait for quite some time but finally it arrived, the bus which would take us to our destination Bangor. It was a short trip and nothing unexpected happened. We noticed some Swedish tourists on the same bus, probably from Umeå University judging by the text on their backpacks. Bangor i a small town and it shouldn´t be hard to find the "Bed & Breakfast" we have pre-booked here.

We found our accomodation. It´s called Germor and is close to the sea. First we were very uncertain if this really was the place because it was just a private home with no sign at all. We pushed the doorbell and waited. Nothing happened. We decided to open the door and looked at a sleeping man on a couch. Had we made a mistake after all? Had we just entered someone´s private living room? The man woke up though and introduced himself as Mr Geraint Wyn Williams. He showed us our little room upstairs and we were offered some tea or coffee in his backyard. He told us a lot of things, for example about his school years when kids weren´t allowed to speak the Welsh language. Here in Bangor you can hear people speak both English and Welsh in the streets.

It was time to find a place to have dinner. We had seen the pub "Nelson" nearby but when we entered it they told us there was no food today because of "chef´s birthday"! Amazing, it felt like stepping into some British comedy show. When we left the pub we started speaking to an old man who probably remembered both the world wars. He was waiting for the local bus but couldn´t read the timetable. He asked us if we were "familiar with the 24 hours system". We explained for him that 18.15 is in fact 6.15 PM. After that he asked us where we are from. We replied "Sweden" but the old man had problems with his hearing and said " ahh, Wigan!, great place!. We were surprised but nothing more happened because his bus approached us and he cried out "the bus, the Lord has answered!" We continued our search for a dinner restaurant.

The dinner today turned out to be a "Take Away Kebab" which we had sitting on a wall close to the sea. Unfortunately it started to get really windy and the wind threw some kebab sauce on Christer´s trousers. Peter managed to avoid this happening to him but when he returned to the room with the empty plastic box he managed to pour some sauce on his clothes as well.

It is getting late and we are tired. We have set our alarm clocks because we want to wake up and have a shower before breakfast is served downstairs the next morning. The TV is showing all the goals from yesterday´s football. There were a lot of games from several leagues but at last we could see the goal from the game we went to yesterday.

Monday 9th of August

We didn´t hear the alarm clocks. We woke up when we heard someone knocking on our door telling us "breakfast in five minutes" with a Welsh accent. We suddenly jumped or flew up from the bed and went downstairs to a big breakfast table where "Welsh breakfast" was served. Welsh breakfast is English breakfast but you add a potato to it. Mr Williams is married to a woman from the Philippines but it seems it´s the husband who is responsible for cooking the Welsh food.

It´s a rainy Monday. We are not walking far because we have no umbrellas. One of our plans though is to make a short journey to the village close to Bangor with the world´s longest name. We´re walking slowly towards the railway station.

Bangor in Wales, a rainy day in August.

We are thinking about what to say when you want to buy a train ticket to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. Somehow Peter managed to buy two tickets and now we´re sitting in a very old train with very soft seats. Our train takes us over a bridge to the island of Anglesey where the famous village is situated.

Signs in both Welsh and English at the railway station in Bangor.

The small place with the long name... Llanfairpwll.......and so on.

We´re in.. (donīt want to write the name again). We´ve found out that it should be a good business to make different kind of signs in this village. There is a souvenir shop here and you can even stamp your passport in the shop which we did. Christer also bought a textile map of Wales to decorate the wall back home.

We are back in Bangor. We have looked on a map over the town and found a football stadium on it. The problem is that we can´t find it in real life. After a while we found it behind some houses. It wasn´t that impressing but teams like Atletico Madrid has been here playing games in the UEFA Cup. The team itself is called Bangor City and plays in the Welsh league.

Farrar Road Stadium, Bangor, accommodates 1,500 spectators.

We went to a supermarket to buy some kind of lunch and now we´re sitting in a steep park (or is it a forest) eating blueberry muffins and drinking orange juice. We´re close to the university and students are passing by on the trail here. We are sitting under some trees because it´s raining again. During the "lunch" we started to discuss what kind of trees you can find in Wales and this was so interesting and we decided to read more about it in a nearby library. What else is there to do when it´s raining?

It´s dinner time. We ended up at the restaurant "Royal Tanddori", an indian restaurant. The food we ordered is supposed to be "medium" when it comes to how spicy it is. It has managed to turn our faces red and we cannot really tell if we´re having chicken, fish, beef or whatever. We only feel the spices. We also ordered beer to drink which only made it worse. Water would have been a better choice. After the meal we experienced salvation when the waiter gave us some "After Eight" mint chocolate and the fire disappeared. The food was good but spicy to say the least. Think twice before ordering dishes from southern India like "Chicken Madras".

First we visited a pub filled with students and not much else. We left it and walked down to a long pier. We´ve taken a walk on it looking at high waves and a real windy weather at sea. The weather made us turn back which was a very good decision because they actually lock the gate at the entrance to the pier at night. It wouldn´t have been very nice spending the night there. After this we made some phonecalls back to Umeå in Sweden, speaking to our friends Patrik and Tobias and Christer´s girlfriend Linda.

Tuesday 10th of August

Another morning with Welsh breakfast. Today we´re planning to make a trip to Mount Snowdon, the highest peak in Wales. We´re travelling with the buses they often use here in Wales. They are smaller than an ordinary bus but it´s not a minibus either. Our destination is Llanberis which is very close to Mount Snowdon. The trip to Llanberis is really beautiful and goes through villages, fields, hills and we can see a lot of nice views.

We didn´t want to stand in a queue forever to the mountain railway. Instead we started to walk uphill on the steep trail going to the top. There are lots of tourists around and it´s a nice walk with amazing views. There are lots of sheep up here and the shepherds have built small houses made of stone along this trail. We´re resting and look at the small train making its way towards the top on the small railway on this mountain. Actually there are small fires starting in the dry grass when the train passes by.

Once again it´s time for juice and muffins but this time the weather is better and so is the view. We bought a lot of muffins. We can´t eat them all and gave some away to some sheep up here. Some of the sheep are making sounds like a small baby crying.

Taking a walk on Mount Snowdon. The sheep send their greetings.

Our ambitious plan to reach the top has been called off. We don´t know if it´s our bodies or our minds telling us to stop. It´s still a long walk to reach the top and we have to walk all the way down again when we´ve finally reached our goal. We started walking down to Llanberis again and jumped on to a bus heading for Bangor.

The castle Beaumaris on the island Anglesey close to Bangor.

After we had returned to Bangor we decided to make a final adventure here in the surroundings. We will travel to the castle Beaumaris on the island Anglesey, just opposite from Bangor. Once again we used the public transport and a smaller version of a bus. If you sit at the back of the bus you will spend a lot of time in the air when the bus travels quickly on bumpy narrow roads.

The castle Beaumaris was really beautiful, everything from the castle itself, the bright green grass to the views towards the coastline. The dinner today is at a cantonese restaurant in Bangor, "Garden Hotel". The food was alright but nothing to remember. Tomorrow we´re leaving Wales. On the news they are just talking about the same thing all the time, the eclipse which will take place tomorrow.

Wednesday 11th of August

Today we´re saying goodbye to Wales and Bangor. We will head east going by train. We´re not really sure what our final destination will be today but we will return to England.

We have bought tickets from Bangor to Crewe and now we´re waiting for our train. The eclipse happened when we were standing on the platform in Bangor but the only thing we noticed was that the birds stopped singing and it got a little bit darker, more or less like it is just before a thunderstorm.

The good thing with travelling in the UK is that you reach your destination rather quickly. We didn´t spend much time on the train before we arrived at the railway station in Crewe. Worth mentioning from the trip is the town Conwy where the railway goes right through the castle or, well, under it. We also stopped at Chester and got a glimpse of that city again. If the trip to Crewe went without trouble it was more difficult to get out of the train. We didn´t manage to open the door and suddenly we started thinking about which the next stop would be. Lucky for us, we could open the door while we were still in Crewe.

We´re at the railway station in Crewe. After some thinking and planning we have decided to buy a ticket to Wigan which is halfway between Liverpool and Manchester and in a good location to explore the area further tomorrow. There was no problem buying the ticket. The next step was more difficult it seems. We sat down on a bench and waited for our train. We waited and waited but our train didn´t arrive. We thought it was late and waited even more before we found out that we were on the wrong platform. We could catch the next train though because our tickets were valid the whole day.

We have reached Wigan. We found a tourist information office because we need a place to sleep two nights. We got the help we had hoped for and now we have checked in at Croftīs Guest House on Upper Dicconson Street.

After we had checked in we decided to take a walk through the central parts of Wigan. The town is a nice place but have no particular sights. The most famous place is Wigan Pier but we never fully understood why it was famous. We have been to a supermarket in the chain "Iceland". There is nothing icelandic about it all but they only sell cold things like frozen fish, freezers, icecream and so on. We continued to the bus station and during our visit there Peter felt something in his hair and touched it. It was a wasp and he got a nasty sting on his hand.

The dinner today was no luxury. We bough a kebab from a take away-place. After finishing it we returned to the guesthouse. We were hoping for something interesting on TV but only found a game of cricket. Peter suffered from a lack of coffee and went downstairs to look for his drug. When he returned he had news about the woman we met earlier, June Croft. She was a former olympic medalist in swimming. Peter had seen documents on the wall showing that she had won medals in the 1980 olympic games. The cricket game on TV suddenly stopped because of darkness and suddenly one team had won it. It wouldn´t continue the next day. Instead they used some strange method deciding which team had won it.

Thursday 12th of August

Finally the opportunity arrived. We had a choice to eat continental breakfast instead of English breakfast. We were asked if we wanted continental or English breakfast and to our surprise we heard our voices say "English". Afterwards we didn´t know why we had said it. Anyway, there will be another morning with English breakfast. They also asked us about our plans for the day. We had already been to Liverpool and Manchester and decided to take a look on another town nearby, Rochdale, and we told about our plans. They looked surprised to say the least and asked politely if we hadnīt considered visiting Manchester instead?

Today our destination is Rochdale like we said. We don´t know why we will visit that place. Well, the obvious reason is that it exists and we haven´t been there yet. Christer visited Bolton and Bury in 1997 but Rochdale is new for both. Another reason is that Rochdale is within the Greater Manchester area which makes the train tickets there quite cheap. On our walk to the railway station we saw the rugby stadium in town. Wigan has a very good rugby team, Wigan Warriors.

The world´s best rugby team, Wigan Warriors. Well, that´s what they told us...

We travelled through Oldham to reach Rochdale, one of many towns around the Greater Manchester area. We went to some shops and visited a mall and a library. We also watched when some security officers dragged a young man out from the mall. We wondered what he had done? Rochdale also has a very strange church situated between two busy streets, it´s an ukrainian-catholic church.

Rochdale.

We´re back from the adventure in Rochdale. Our journey is soon over and it´s time to think about the long trip home to Sweden. We took an evening walk and looked at the brand new football stadium, JJB Stadium. Both the football team and the rugby team will play there. Around the stadium we also noticed a lot of shops and this will probably be an area for shopping in the future. On our way here Christer found some berries on a bush and tried them to check what kind it was. Now he can´t walk because a muscle in his leg is acting really weird. Is it the berries or something else? Now he can walk again and the berries were probably ordinary blackberry.

JJB Stadium. A new stadium for the football team Wigan Atheltic.

We had dinner at KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken in Wigan. Once again we had great difficulties understanding what the girl behind the counter actually tried to tell us. It´s not easy understanding the accents and dialects in northwest England.

Friday 13th of August

A lot of people believe that bad luck comes with this day, Friday the 13th. We have no choice. We have to travel today and hopefully weīll return home. We checked out from our Wigan guesthouse and now we will have a lunch at a pub downtown. We had chicken curry, it was delicious! We also had a chat with an elderly gentleman about Wigan and its rugby team.

One train took us to Manchester and another train brought us out to the airport. The trip back home has started. On the plane there were a lot of teenage girls from Stockholm who had been in England for language studies. They complained about everything the way Swedish people often do when they go abroad. Everything which is not the way it is at home is so bad. We wonder why they left Sweden at all? When we reached Arlanda airport later they didn´t know if Sweden was a part of the European Union or not and decided to stand in the queue to the passport control for "not citizens in the European Union". It was kind of funny to see the teenagers there together with some Asians and Africans.

After arriving to Arlanda Airport north of Stockholm we changed plane and continued with a flight north to Umeå and after that this trip has reached its end.