Spring Break Rewind North Wales Day 5

Yet another gorgeous day in Cardiff! Still no signs of the ash cloud here, but the pollen is deadly. I'm supposed to be on a field trip today, but the professor never emailed to tell me where and when I was supposed to meet the group, hopefully he will sometime today so I can go on tomorrow's?

Day 5 was probably the day the group looked forward to least. What did we have scheduled? A woolen mill and a slate museum. Didn't sound too thrilling, but it turned out to be a really great day.

The Trefriw Woollen Mill is still run in a semi old fashioned way, it still operates off water power, which is pretty neat. Our guide was pretty quiet and hard to hear, but turned on and showed us how each of the machines in the process of carding, cleaning, dying and weaving wool worked. The machines were crazy cool. The place held special interest for the group as most of us were in the process of knitting something. Their gift shop made out well.

The spinning machines, a huge room with this machine along both walls all working as one huge spinner.

We had lunch at Betws-y-Coed where Prof. Geier dubbed me "The Enforcer" to get his kids to behave at the table. I made some appropriately stern monster faces and it worked. The kids are really growing to like us and be totally comfortable with us, it's pretty funny to hang out with them. And they were the reason we all got ice cream after lunch on Colgate's dime, so we owe them one.

We headed to the National Slate Museum, bringing us back to the dread Llanberis. The museum was actually really cool. Our tour guide was a carpenter that worked for the slate mine until it closed in 1969. He gave us a cool take on the place, not having been a miner himself. We got to tour all the workshops, including the foundries, and pattern shop (totally a tour for my dad), and see the UK's biggest water wheel that used to power the whole place. We got a slate splitting demonstration, in which Eric (youngest Geier child) got to try it, and was hilarious. Our demonstrater even made a cicular cutting board out of slate for him to take home. It was seriously impressive to watch him just whack this piece of slate into a perfect circle pretty much free hand. Slate splitting is still a viable trade, it is one of the few industial processes that still has to be done by hand. Even Llanberis slate, which is supposedly some of the best in the world will break (up to 70% of it) in any machine made to split slate today.

Patterns in the shop

It was our last night in Caernarvon, and we had dinner free. Armed with our 20 pounds, the whole group headed out for Thai food (see we hardly ever split up). It was pretty good, and I think a good introduction to those who had never had it before. We then headed to a local pub to celebrate Paikin's birthday. We played cards and got stared at by the locals pretty hard, it being pre tourist season, and us being American. We then headed back with a rather tipsy Paikin (who attempted to study for the MCATs) where we spent the rest of the night watching Mulan and singing along.