Back...finally

So, I am now back from both Snowdonia and Bath. We left monday morning in mini buses to go to North Wales to the Snowdonia Mountain range. We stopped a couple times along the way for lunch and to get food for the whole week. Each group, there are three, had to cordinate and get enough food for there own groups. Our group has 11, and is the largest group. After spending 1.5 hours and a heck of a lot of money, none of which we had to pay for, the program covers it, we set off for our final destination. Our hostel was nice they were divided up girls and boys from all groups. I went with Tecwyn and Ian a man in his 70's who orignally started the course for the Americans, to take Tecwyn to his house. On our way back, Tecwun called that he had forgot his keys, so Ian and I were going to drive all the way back and have to go all the way back again, luckily he caught a taxi instead. Ian gave me the history of all of the mountians we passed along the way, it was really cool. I have climed in the same range that Sir Edmund Hillary trained at before he did his famous climb up Mt. Everest. The first night we relaxed and layed around, we cooked forzen lasagana from TESCO, which was acutally quite good. We played Trivial Pursuit the British Genius edition, we knew most of the answers but some we had no clue. Tuesday we all got up and were ready to go by 8:45. We set off for our first day of hiking and scrabling. Scrabling is a hybrid between hiking and climbing. You and climbing hand over hand but the angle of assent is less then vertical. It took us most of the day to get to the peak of the mountain, we have a slower group because we have 11 amoung other things... On the way down one of our leaders, Ian, who is in his 70's missed a rock and sliced his hand open. He actually has the same birthday and I do. He said he had a feeling I was a 13 too, January was that much more coinsidental. That night I learned how to play Euchre. I have always heard about it but never knew how to play, but now I do. It is 500 with less cards and you don't bid. That became the game to play the whole week. We cooked chili, it tasted really good, because on our way down it started to rain. The next day we had to back off a little because of some of the people in our group. We started off the day thinking it was going to be rediculously easy, which made, those of us that wanted a challenge really mad. Turned out that we "changed our path" and were going to do some scrabling. So we went up a ridge to get to the summit of Snowdon, that tallest mountain in Wales. This gave us a great veiw of the wall Hillary trained on, don't worry I have pictures. So I got to the top of Snowdon and called my dad :) Then we went down the way we were going to come up. A couple of us were able to go ahead and that made our decent quite fast. That night we played more Euckre and cooked spagetti and potatoes, it was ok, but we didn't have enough sauce it was still good. Thursday we woke up figuring we were going to have a really easy day, because everyone was tired and probably didn't want to scramble anymore. We were happily mistaken. Our guide Andy gave us a choice those of us that were tired could go with Ian and hike, and those of us that didn't want to hike could do a really difficult scramble. I scrambled and it was really fun, hard but fun. It was very technical and quite steep and high. We were tired by the end of the day. As we were coming down we watched that other 2/3rds of our group drive off in the mini bus. We knew they would be back, and it would give us an opportunity to see another famous climbing place. There is a little hotel with a pub in it that has been there for a long time, not 5 mins away from were our bus was. So we walked in and had a drink...of lemonade. This was the hotel Hillary and his party stayed in when they trained. And where they went to celebrate the aniverseries of there climb. The names of them, and other famous climbers are in the ceiling of the pub. It was really cool. That night it had been decided we were going to have hamburgers and use a grill that was in the main house of our hostel. After making the patties, and running over to the house in the rain, only to find the grill was broke, a alternative was quikly decided on. I would break out my made stove top broiling skills. So I proceeded to cook 20 hamburgers useing a frying pan, oil, lots of water and a spatula. They were, really really good. After that, we had been promised a trip to a pub. We went down to a little pub, spent some time there, came back and went to bed. Friday morning we all woke up early to clean before we left. We stopped in a little tourist town and shopped around for a little bit, there was really cool outdoor stores, but I didn't buy anything..but it was hard not to. We got back around 2:30 and had a choice of 3 trains 3:30, 4:30, and 5:30 by the time we got around to figuring out what to do, we took the 5:30 train to....Bath. We got ther around 9ish checked into our YMCA hostel and headed out for food. We had really good really cheap Indian food, then we all crashed because we were tired. This group included, Me, Catie, Andi, Dane, Rebecca, Joe, Matt, Taylor, Ann, and Ashley. The next morning we were going to shop around Bath and go to Stonehenge in the afternoon, Joe made a few calls and some guy would give us a private tour for the same price and another tour that was full, but we had to leave right then, so we did. We drove about an hour to Stonehenge, through the area that the US GI's were at before the D-Day invasion, it is still used for training, we saw a "Tank Crossing" sign. Our tour guide was really good too. We learned were a majority of phrases and names come from, which are mostly from around Bath. Stonehenge was really cool, it is just kinda out in the middle of no where. We decided for a little extra we could go down to Salisbury. We went down there, there market had been running for every saturday since 1215, and has never missed one saturday, even throughout the 2 world wars. We saw the Cathederal there, which has one of the 4 remaining copies of the Magna Carta. So that was cool. We took a different way back to Bath and got some homemade Strong Cider, Mom and Dad you will find out what Stronge Cider is when you come. It is quite tasty. So back to these phrases. The Earl of Pembroke, which is a town in Wales, used to play cards with two fellows. One had a servant, that he told, if he didn't bring him something different then his bread with butter, because he was sick of it, he would have him killed, so his servant stuffed meat and butter inside the bread. His servants last name was Sandwich. The other fellow always wore a sweater, but never took it off over his head because he was afraid the others would cheat. So he finally put buttons on his sweater, and his name was Cartigan. There are about 10 other things like this our guide told us, it was quite interesting. We got back to the "Shire" as it is now lovingly called about 9pm. We order some food and had it delivered, then went to bed. This morning we woke up, Caite, Rebecca, Dane, Ann, Andi, and I went to church and then had lunch. We are now trying to find cheap ski resorts so we can go skiing in the Alps the weekend before we go home, who knows how that will turn out....I will get pictures of these trips up soon. Later