Pancake date

For Pancake Day, Cathy and I went out for pancakes. I took an awkward selfie showing us with our pancakes.

Power shopping!

A work trip to London this week included an evening to amuse myself, so I took the tube to visit Battersea Power Station. This has been done up as a premium shopping experience. Among the stores is a brand new Lego Shop. I'd packed my Lego passports in the hope of getting them stamped.

The exterior of the Power Station looks very pretty lit up at night.

Inside, the vastness of the former turbine halls is awe inspiring.

I found the Lego Shop and admired some of the artefacts within. Of note, the 'build a minifigure' station, and the Power Station replicated in Lego and depicted on a frieze made out of Lego bricks.

I was also looking for somewhere to eat. I found this place...

I phoned Cathy while waiting for my order. I told her I was in a restaurant called 'Where the pancakes are' and she said "Well, I know why you're there!" Well, where else would I be if that was where the pancakes were?

I had something called a 'Dutch baby' - think of a Yorkshire pudding made with apples and almonds, served with a scoop of ice cream. 

After that rather filling meal, I had another wander around the shopping arcade, which is full of original bits and bobs. 

There was something gloriously optimistic about the way the building had been transformed. It had an authentic industrial chic and worked with it to create a futuristic feeling space. I don't usually rave on about shopping centres, but this was special. 

Wythnos yn yr Gogledd, Mehefin 2023

With a week of leave to take before the end of my notice period, we booked an apartment in Felinheli on the coast of the Menai Strait. It had a view of the Strait and Anglesey and was an ideal base for exploring new places and revisiting some favourite spots.

Fave places like Dinas Dinlle just south of Caernarfon. This is such a lovely beach with incredible pebbles and lovely sand which is ideal for sandcastles. 

We were very blessed to be joined for some of the week with our friend Ella. She contributed to the sandcastle building exploits. 

We had a sandcastle building contest one night. Neither of them could withstand the incoming tide, however. (We stayed on the beach right into the depths of the midsummer evening. That's the beauty of holidaying in June!)

Next to the beach is a restaurant called Braf. I had pancakes for breakfast there. 

And Cathy spotted a great reminder of home on the wall. Almost literally. That scene is two streets away!

We had been to Beaumaris before but we hadn't done the cruise around Puffin Island. The name is apparently a misnomer as it is sans puffins for most of the year. We saw some swimming in the water though!

One bonus about having Ella with us was getting to do all the cheesy tourist things because she hadn't done them before. 

Things like going to the Smallest House in Conwy...

And posing for photos with the station sign at Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch...

And paying our respects by being suitably mournful at Gelert's Grave in Beddgelert before buying ice creams from the Glaslyn ice cream shop...

And not seeing Yr Wyddfa because it was hiding in the clouds...

And posing with a steam train...

And visiting lots of castles!!

That's me waving at the very top!

(There's one genuine castell Cymreig in those photos!)

The day after Ella had to (sadly) go home, Cathy and I went back to Anglesey and visited Newborough beach for the first time. It was incredible. 

I'm already looking forward to going back there next time we have a week in the North!

USA & Canada 2016 - the long trip back to the coast and the last few days

This is my last post in the series detailing our trip to the USA and Canada. It was six weeks ago today that we arrived back in the UK.

As mentioned in the previous post, we crossed over the Rainbow Bridge next to Niagara Falls and started the 300 or so mile trip across New York State.

Before we left Canada we went to a rare Canadian IHOP, where I had the healthy breakfast. It had fruit on it and everything.

(Here's some proof it was Canadian - the Maple Leaf in the O of IHOP)

Our destination was Albany where we were going to stay the night before driving across Massachusetts the following day. Unfortunately the motel we had booked there was not a good place. It was the same chain we had stayed in back in Niagara, but in Albany the building and bedroom was filthy. We checked in and then we did something we had never done before - we checked back out again! There was another hotel across the road, and we got a room there. It wasn't great, but at least we didn't feel like we would wake up murdered.

We got out of Albany pretty quickly the following morning. We had quite a bit of driving to do. Cathy took a lot of photos out of the windows because there was always something to see. Whether that was the expanse of sky over the open country...

...or flame-decals on big red trucks.

We stopped at one of West Massachusetts's biggest tourist attractions: the factory outlet for the Yankee Candle company.

If you like Yankee Candles, then you need to go to Yankee Candle Village. Even if you don't, it's worth a visit. They have a year-round Christmas village full of decorations. O gauge trains run overhead in many of the rooms. They have a great toy shop, which includes this Lego model of  the 'Village'.

Eventually we got back in the car and drove back right through Boston and up towards Marblehead, a little town on the coast. We had much nicer lodgings here, in a B&B.

There isn't much in Marblehead.

But they do have a very nice headland, that is peaceful and scenic.

It has this oddly-constructed lighthouse on it.

There's also a fort and a harbour. There is a lot of history in the place. The first ship commissioned into the new United States navy after the declaration of independence was from Marblehead.

It's also just down the coast from Salem, which is of course famous for one thing - the witch trials. The town now is full of occulty shops selling witchy tat. It also has a statue of America's most loved witch, Samantha from Bewitched.

And it's not all witches. There were a number of churches too.

We had lunch at the sci-fi themed Flying Saucer Pizza Company restaurant. They did vegan pizzas. Their decor was all kinds of ace.

As was their signage.

The following day we headed back to Boston to the airport, stopping on the way on another headland called Nahant, where we got a view across the water of the Boston skyline in the distance.

Soon we were driving back into Boston. On the way to Marblehead we had passed this gloriously named place.

On the way back we saw this confusing signage that I'm sure had a deeper meaning.

We were leaving Wonderland and coming home. It had been an epic 17 days and it was all over far too soon.