A proper soaking
I open my window to the view below. It’s strange to arrive somewhere in the night and not know what your surroundings look like.
Quite lovely really. And here's the table where we pack our lunches:
Our hike today started and ended in Betws-y-Coed, which I can now pronounce. We climbed through the Gwydr Forest (pine, spruce?), not native anyway. We passed several mine openings and a mill where chunks of rock were broken down. The mines produced nickel and lead. The quarries produced slate. You get an impression that Welsh men are as strong as draught horses, industrious, fearless. And possibly short lived.
Our hike continued through a hilly and boggy sheep farm. Then down through another forest and along a river to the deafening Swallow Falls.
It was a lovely hike, marred by the fact that it rained the entire day. I was soaked through by mid-hike, despite having on my “waterproofs.”
What was interesting was my old friend Impatient Irma showed up every time we stopped. We were a group of six hikers and the trip leader, a lovely young Dutch woman called Wilhemina. I would be the youngest by a decade at least (bar the leader). So the group moved fairly slowly and each stop was interminable, as members took their packs off, removed their pack covers, rummaged around, had a bit of tea and a snack, and then reassembled. Being soaked, including squishy boots, meant I got chilled when we stopped. What helped me tell Irma to pipe down was the uniform loveliness and cheerfulness of my fellow hikers. They had 100 reasons why we were really fortunate. And we were—the air temperature was not that low, let’s say 52 when we expected mid 40s. And there was very little wind. It could have been much worse. They kept piping up with cheerful observations—how much prettier the waterfall was due to the rain, how it was good to be in a forest, and so on. They made me laugh at my own occasional grumpiness.
It really is nice to have a group of rosy cheeked, cheery pensioners reset your internal compass, let’s call it your grumpass. When I’ve hiked on my own, my grumpass resets itself. I actually wrote an entire essay about this once. You face enough adversity when you hike that your instinct is to overcome it by boosting your positive outlook. I called the essay “Why I Hike.” But I’ve never hiked on a day where it rained constantly. So my “always look on the bright side of life” companions were boon indeed.
I forgot to mention today was my birthday—it’s nice to forget that. Not because I’m getting older but just because I had better things to do than think about my birthday. At the end of the hike, a hot shower and getting into bed—surely not a better present than being dry and warm after being cold and wet for so many hours.
April 27