I visited the National Garden three times during my visit to Athens, once to walk through on the way to the Panathenaic Stadium, once for some welcome shade to reapply my sunscreen before heading to the Benaki Museum and once to actually explore the gardens themselves. They are 38 acres (so I didn’t explore the whole thing) and up until 1974 were called the Royal Garden, which gives you the first hint about their origins.
After visiting the West Shore Beach and walking all the way to Deganwy and back I then ventured partly up the Great Orme. I didn’t venture very far; I’d done a considerable amount of walking by that point but as it was the last day of my holiday I pushed on for a bit to see the views from this side of the Orme.
I hadn’t particularly planned on walking up the Great Orme on this trip since I’d been up there before, but then found myself doing so on three different occasions. On this journey I simply decided I was still in a walking mood after being at the Happy Valley Botanical Gardens so I followed the road from the top of the gardens until I came across a trail going upwards and decided to see where it went. At it turned out it was to the site of the Pen-Y-Dinas Hillfort.
I knew when researching ideas for this trip that I wanted to visit some places I hadn’t been to before and that I wanted to visit somewhere relating to animals. On our previous trip we went to the Welsh Mountain Zoo which is excellent but basically impossible to get to by public transport. But my researches lead me to Bodafon Farm Park which I hadn’t come across any mention of on our last visit to Llandudno.
I visit Stonebridge City Farm fairly regularly and, when it’s been allowed to open during the pandemic, it’s always a lovely (and safe) place to visit for a change of scene during various lockdowns. Here are a few photos from my most recent visit.
A few weeks ago I paid a visit to Stonebridge City Farm which I’ve written about on many previous occasions. This time I was delighted to see that they had lambs and kids in the fields, so here are a few of my favourite photos.
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Africa Alive! is a wildlife park in Suffolk; purchased in 1991 it is part of the Zoological Society of East Anglia, along with its sister organisation Banham Zoo. They have around 1,000 species from Africa over 100 acres of parkland and we ended up spending the entire day there, finding much to explore from animals we were familiar with to those we were decidedly not.
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On what turned out to be a surprisingly sunny day in October we headed out to Stonebridge City Farm which, as the name suggests, is right in the heart of Nottingham City. The barn was erected in 1980 and the first animals to be housed there were 2 goats, but it is now home to a range of animals from chickens to cows and horses, as well as gardens and a small nature trial.
Please note photos have been removed due to lack of hosting space.
Since my final full day was so nice that I actually had to use the sunglasses I’d thankfully thought to pack, I decided to walk out to Laugardalur Valley and visit the zoo. It’s open all year round but I suspect that it’s a bit livelier in the summer than when I went.
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