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 discovered The Owls Trust in Llandudno when researching potential things to visit in the town that I hadn’t been to before. The Trust has been allowed to set up their facilities at Bodafon Farm Park and entrance to the farm also includes entrance to the Trust’s bird cages. They are a charity rescuing and rehabilitating injured birds of prey which if possible they release back into the wild and also work to protect rare breeds around the world.
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.
Llandudno’s promenade is approximately two miles long and is a great place for a walk with historic buildings and hotels on one side and the sea and the sands on the other. I’d walked part of the promenade along the North Shore nearest the Pier on a previous trip but this time I also walked to near the end of the promenade as I went to visit a farm nearby (more of which next time).
The Llandudno Museum and Gallery is another place we missed out on visiting on our previous trip to the town so I made sure to explore it this time around. The museum has six permanent galleries that tell the history of Llandudno from its very earliest beginnings up to the modern day. Adult tickets are £6.
The Home Front Museum was one of two musuems in Llandudno that we’d considered visiting on our last trip but ran out of time so I made sure to fit them both in this time round. Opened in 2000 in a building that had been requisitioned during the Second World War by the Auxiliary Fire Service from a garage run by a Frank Meredith and his sons, it houses a collection of artefacts highlighting life on the home front during the Second World War with a partiulcar focus on life in Llandudno.
After I booked my trip to Conwy due to several factors including train strikes being on and off again because of the Queen’s funeral I ended up extending my stay in Wales in order to avoid the worst of the travel chaos. I had considered going somewhere new but since I was booking so close to when I was travelling I wasn’t left with a lot of reasonably priced options so I decided to go back to Llandudno which benefited from being a place I really like and an easy half hour bus journey from Conwy.
Llandudno is the largest seaside resort in Wales and its pier is also the longest at 2,295 feet.. The current pier, opened to the public on 1 August 1877 is Grade II listed, lined with shops, fairground rides and a café.
Louise Jayne's Blog 