Caernarfon is a short drive from Beddgelert and it is a coastal town in Wales. The castle is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. As Cynthia is attracted to anything UNESCO, she has boldly added Caernarfon onto our travel agenda. Now I must say, Caernarfon is beautiful. The best of all? There is a reasonable £5 per day flat charge for parking, which relieved us from having to figure out how many hours we need to park the car upfront. How would a tourist know how much time it is required to tour the city? How would we estimate the time required to queue and enter into, say, a castle? How much time should we spend exploring the castle without even knowing what to expect? Of all the car parks we have visited, only one offered flat-rate parking and another charged us when we left (I will get to that in another post). The rest needed some crazy guesstimation.
The photo album (with captions) can be accessed via this link. The camera I used was a Nikon Z6 with a 35mm Z lens.
There is an entrance fee in order to enter the Caernarfon Castle. The person who collected the money spoke in Welsh. It seems that this castle is popular amongst the locals because the ones in front of us spoke Welsh. So did the ones behind.
The castle has quite a few towers. If not for Cynthia’s superb sense of direction, I would have got lost many times. To climb up the towers, there are narrow staircases going both ways. Each tower has multiple levels whereby you could get out and take some pictures. Some towers are connected through the mid-levels and hence, it can get really confusing.
The view at the top of each tower is amazing. Needless to say, each tower offers a different outward and inward view. As a photographer, I was confused a great deal. I ended up taking A LOT of photographs and that took me a long time to figure out which ones to delete.
In the morning, the tide was low. In the afternoon, the seawater level had risen. This offered a unique photography opportunity. I love it! There is a bridge that connects the castle to another part of the coast. It can be opened up in order to allow ships getting through the canal (see the photo album). I overheard that during the recent heatwave, the bridge was stuck as it failed to rotate. It is a rather old mechanical bridge so I was told.
Our next destination was a beach in the town of Llandudno. I wasn’t expecting to visit a beach in the UK but my wife managed to fit that into our diary. It isn’t a sandy beach though. It is a beach full of small rocks (and oversized seagulls).
We had fish-and-chips for lunch and burger and doner kebab for dinner. Not exactly a healthy kind of diet. I couldn’t finish the chips and I fed the seagulls instead. I knew I really shouldn’t. But those pleading eyes. How could I say no? And my friends, that explains the size of the evolved seagulls.
Damn those eyes (and their immense patience).