Told off for a second time for same thing in 3 years...

We woke up pretty early - it was still dreary. I think that's probably normal for Aberystwyth. We had our breakfast which was good - it generally is in proper guest houses.

We already had our plans set for a bit of a tour of Wales so we got on the road pretty early and headed up towards north wales with no set itinerary. Within the hour we got distracted by lots of signs advertising King Arthurs Labyrinth. A labyrinth in Wales? That was enough to catch our attention. We detoured to take it in.

It turned out to be this place. We asked the guy at the ticket booth whether it would be interesting for us or if it was mainly aimed at kids / families. He assured us the abandoned mines labyrinth was cool for visitors of all ages.

We paid the fee and got our hard hats. First time I'd worn a hard hat since I went on a school trip to a mine in France. Strange coincidence that eh? Nonetheless, the hard hats really brought out the child in TT and as we were stood in King Arthurs own gift shop she wasted no time in taking a plastic sword from a rack and whacking me around the hard-hat with it. I was laughing so much at the looks from the "real grown-ups" that I couldn't possibly defend myself.

We had a bit of time to kill until the next tour so we went and looked around the place while we waited. TT found a little stall that was selling Celtic jewelry. She bought a beautiful earring and put it in immediately. Just one mind, not a pair! She's like that, I love my girls strange ways. Then we went back to the gift shop/tour departure point.

Suddenly this guy in full outfit appears and proclaims to be Merlin. No reaction from crowd. But in fairness there were only about 20 people and most of them were busy watching TT and I to see if we were going to be more entertaining than him...

He led us down towards the foot of mountain and we then had to walk down an almost pitch black tunnel for about 5 minutes. At the end a boat waited for us in the flooded mine labyrinth. As soon as we got on board it started chugging along and all the way we had an audio commentary of King Arthur stories. It sounds childish but it was actually pretty cool. They had lots of lighting effects and just the geology of the mountain was good to see. TT and I kept making comments louder than we thought we were and I suspect we were the largest source of entertainment on the boat.

After that we carried on up the coast, having decided that we'd try to make it to Bangor to sleep the night there.

We stopped en-route at a little chef. This was an experience for TT. I'd warned her they were bad, but my warnings obviously weren't harsh enough. Little Chef restaurants are crap. Make no mistake, they're awful. Nonetheless, she was hungry and getting bored of service station sandwiches which cost more than 10 times the price of a loaf of bread.

So, we stopped at a little chef/thief. She ordered soup of the day and I ordered some sort of salad. My thinking was that if they didn't have to cook it, they'd have less chance of screwing it up. The soup was funny, the waitress went out the back, spoke to kitchen, then brought out a can of Heinz tomato soup in full view and just tipped the contents into a bowl and microwaved it. Honestly! TT was shocked that they could charge £5 for soup that obviously came from a 49p can but I pointed out to her at least they hadn't cooked it...

My salad was less fortunate, it was a few days old and basically a pile of wilted browning lettuce. I think there was some other stuff in it too but I couldn'tconfidentiallyy identify any of it. I think the round brown bits were at some point cucumber, and the red sludgy stuff was probably oncetomatoe. We paid (yeah, honestly! I couldn't be arsed to argue!) and left. Got a sandwich at service station next door instead!

We carried on until we got to Caernafon. The scenery on route was wonderful. TT comes from Wales but only as a kid and she'd only previously known Swansea area. It was great to show her the scenic parts of the country and I'd never been to that part either.

Caernafon has a wonderful castle and is a beautiful town generally. The only shocking thing was that when I went into the public toilets near the car park I was reallysurprisedd to see two guys passed out on the floor under the influence of Heroin. And the walls were covered in posters advising people not to approach people on the floor. And there were syringe bins on every wall. Guess that place has a bit of a drug problem?!

We left and carried on up to Bangor. I've been to Bangor once before. My friend went to uni there and I visited him then. So I went drive about and tried to find the places we went to when I was last there. It was really great to go back. The last time I was there it was because I'd just split with a long-term girl friend and I just needed to see my friend. This time I was with TT. It was wonderful to visit a place that I associated with bad times with a girl I love so much.

I remembered that last time I was there I'd parked my car in a pub car park to go for a walk on thepierr and the landlady of the pub had come out and shouted at me for parking there. Ii was relating this story to TT as we pulled into the same carpark to do the same thing. We left the car and had a romantic walk on thepierr. Guess what happened as we got back to the car?!

Landlady:" You shouldn't leave your car here! We're not a f#cking carpark you know!" The funny thing is that the area is dead. There's no shortage of parking. The only reason I parked there was because I felt guilty from the time years before and I'd been planning to take TT inside for a drink. After that interjection I changed my mind and we just got in the car and drove off.

We found a guest house (or gwesty as we'd started calling them, having noticed signs all overWaless pointing out hotels in Welsh) and checked in. It was quite posh. After recovering for a bit we went out for a few beers and I showed TT the bits of Bangor I remembered from the last time I was there. Again it felt really odd. Last time I was there I hated it because I was feeling so bitter about my ex-partner. This time every second was a pleasure because I was with TT. I love this girl.

Woke: Aberystwyth
Bed: Bangor
Done: 100 miles