Martha's Marvellous Munchies

As I stood on the metal platform in my harness, I reminded myself that this wasn't the really  big one. That was the one where you swooped for a kilometre over the cluttered heaps of grey slate, possibly with a parachute fluttering behind you to slow your speedy descent.  This one was - I risked a look down - really quite small. I glanced at Theo, next to me, as the man behind us counted down. Three...two...one... And we jumped. The boys said the zip wire at Zip World Llechwedd was the highlight of the holiday in Wales. Of course, they now want to go back and try out the massive Titan one. "Big Red" was quite big enough for me! I have to admit that was a good day all round. After our zip wire experience in the morning, we headed over to Criccieth in the afternoon, which was surprisingly hot and sunny. Criccieth has a beautiful big sweep of bay with a castle perched at one end, and the kind of beach where you can spend a long time hopping over rocks and paddling through li...

 "Per-gol" Toby said, reading the sign.  "Hey, that's a much better word than Danger.  Welsh is great!" Actually, the word is Perygl and comes out more like pear-reyg-l, but it didn't really matter - the boys had already fallen in love with everything Welsh, and were happily agreeing that all the words were far more interesting than their English equivalents. We seemed to encounter a lot of perygl on our two days in Wales.  Signs warned us against flying golf balls, steep drops, deep water and narrow roads, but fortunately we survived unscathed apart from one scraped shin (that was Theo falling off a rock).  In fact, it was a remarkably good short break, with perfect weather, beautiful scenery, and the main attraction: a big blue camper van to carry us around. Graham's friend Ben had converted the van a couple of years ago, and kindly agreed to lend it to us for the weekend at the end of half term.  After a rather last-minute search for places to park ...

Really this post should be a Monthly Munch, but I feel like my last few posts have covered most of the things I'd usually put in my regular roundup.  So I thought I'd concentrate on the interesting part: the last three days of August. We set out on the Monday morning and drove west, to the area where England meets Wales and all the road signs suddenly become bilingual.  A couple of hours later, we arrived at the lush green beauty of Ty Mawr Country Park, just outside of Wrexham/Wrecsam (yes, many of the places have two names, or at least two spellings, too).  What a view to eat lunch by! That bridge arching across the valley is the Cefn viaduct, a close relative of the bridge we had really come to see.  The viaduct carries a train line across the River Dee; it's actually taller and a lot more visible than its cousin along the valley, the Pontcysyllte aqueduct.  The canal-carrying aqueduct is the famous one, but it hides itself well.  I thought we migh...