My trip to Wales did not start as smoothly as I had hoped it would. After a little internet research at my hostel the day before, I had found a ferry from Dublin harbor to Holyhead, Wales leaving at seven in the morning. So after checking out of my Dublin hostel at an ungodly 5am and hiking to the bus station on the other side of town in the rain, I was more than a little disappointed to find that the guy who was supposed to drive the bus to the harbor hadn’t shown up for work that morning. I wasn’t the only one there who was up in arms about the missing bus driver, there were at least a dozen other people looking to make that same 7AM ferry. I eventually split a cab to the harbor with an old woman who I immediately took a liking to after hearing her professionally proficient use of profanity in the bus station.

The ferry was just as gargantuan as the one that had brought me from Scotland to Belfast a few weeks earlier. There were over a dozen levels of shops, eateries, lounges, movie theaters, game rooms, and more to entertain people on the two hour cruise to the big island across the pond. Unfortunately for me, there seemed to be an entire English middle school on the ship that morning coming home from a weekend trip to Ireland. They walked around in verbose prepubescent packs, shouting at the top of their lungs and vandalizing every surface they came into contact with. I never once saw any chaperones or teachers, I assume because they were all cowering in a secluded bar somewhere steadying their nerves with Bloody Maries while the kids ran amok. There was a small library with a few comfy chairs on the shopping deck, and after hearing one of the schoolchildren scoff at the pointlessness of an “onboard book room,” I decided seek shelter inside. I ended up falling asleep in an easy chair while reading my Bill Bryson book and was awakened by the captain announcing our arrival in Holyhead, Wales.

The customs check between Ireland and Wales was hysterically lax. After leaving the ferry and walking into the official customs office, everyone was scrambling to produce their passports for the anticipated security checkpoint. Indeed, there was a small wall of gun-toting policemen ahead, but the crowd broke against them and dispersed around them without the slightest resistance. Only once or twice did I see one of the policemen ask someone if they had a passport, but even then it was a distinctively half-hearted request. I followed the crowd and eventually found myself on a train platform. I got on the next train that arrived, clueless and ticketless, hoping that it would take me somewhere interesting. I found a seat and did a bit of googling on my phone. Northern Wales didn’t seem to have much in the way of hostels, but there was one in a nearby city called Conwy. After asking a few friendly locals on the train about how to best get to Conwy, I got off a few stops later and hiked into town.

Conwy doesn’t have its own train station, so vagabonds like myself have to walk along a bayside bridge right up to the front gates of the imposing Conwy castle when they first arrive. The castle was a spectacular spectacle of stone battlements, and I decided to tour it immediately despite still having my heavy backpack with me. Fresh from Ireland, I attempted to pay the small entrance fee in Euros, forgetting that I was officially back in the Queen’s domain and therefore needed to dig out some pounds from the bottom of my bag. Built in the late thirteenth century by Edward the first, Conwy castle played an integral part in more than a few English conquests. Without a doubt, Conwy castle was my favorite castle in the UK, if anything just because of how much there was to freely explore. Not an inch of the castle that was off limits to visitors and I climbed every single tower and descended into every single dungeon. I must have been there for a full two hours before I finally left.

My favorite historic fact that I learned about the castle was how Welsh rebels reclaimed Conwy from the English in 1401, shortly after the tyrannical Henry IV took the throne. One Sunday, while the majority of the castle’s soldiers were in town for morning mass, two brothers with the Welsh resistance approached the front gate disguised as carpenters to gain entry and lied their way into the castle. Coincidentally this dastardly prank took place on April 1st, a day we still set aside today for fooling each other. The two Welshmen killed the two men on watch and locked the castle up tight for fifteen weeks, living lavishly off of the food reserves for the English army, until a surrender was finally negotiated.

I walked uphill from the castle to the youth hostel on the outskirts of the city. It was a very spacious and clean hostel that sported an exceptionally scenic rooftop terrace. The price per night was also very agreeable for such nice accommodation. After dropping my backpack in my room, I set right back out to explore more of the city. The major highlights of little Conwy for me were the medieval sword shop, the mussel museum, the “Smallest House in Britain,” and the pristinely preserved city walls open to the public to explore. Conwy may have been small, but it was bursting at the seams with character and culture.

The next morning I packed a day bag and set out to hike to the peak of Conwy Mountain, which was more of a largish hill set with boulders that separated the town from the coastline. I walked along some muddy trails that traversed a farm across from my hostel until I reached the foot of the mountain and a trailhead for the summit hike.

The trail quickly emerged from a thicket of small trees and wound its way along sprawling grassy knolls by the sea. It took me about two hours to reach the top where a group of young locals were sitting down to a backpacker’s lunch. I unpacked my own lunch and joined them, making some friendly conversation. They told me that if I continued hiking along the ridge-line I would eventually come within sight of Puffin Island, so with the sun still high in the sky, I decided to take their advice and pressed on.

After about another half hour of hiking I reached another crest in the ridge where I found something strange… Laying there in the middle of the weather-beaten trail were two halves of a coconut shell. It wasn’t fleshy, like the ones you might buy in a supermarket, and it looked like it had been there for decades, if not centuries. I looked at the coconut, then at the distant walls of Conwy castle, and suddenly in my mind, the following scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail played out with shocking clarity:

GUARD #1: Halt! Who goes there?
ARTHUR: It is I, Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, from the castle of Camelot. King of the Britons, defeator of the Saxons, sovereign of all England! And this my trusty servant Patsy. We have ridden the length and breadth of the land in search of knights who will join me in my court of Camelot. I must speak with your lord and master.
GUARD #1: What, ridden on a horse?
ARTHUR: Yes!
GUARD #1: You’re using coconuts!
ARTHUR: What?
GUARD #1: You’ve got two empty halves of coconut and your bangin”em together.
ARTHUR: So? We have ridden since the snows of winter covered this land, through the kingdom of Mercea, through–
GUARD #1: Where’d you get the coconuts?
ARTHUR: We found them.
GUARD #1: Found them? In [Wales]? The coconut’s tropical!
ARTHUR: What do you mean?
GUARD #1: Well, this is a temperate zone.
ARTHUR: The swallow may fly south with the sun or the house martin may seek warmer climates in winter yet these are not strangers to our land.
GUARD #1: Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?
ARTHUR: Not at all, they could be carried.
GUARD #1: What — a swallow carrying a coconut?
ARTHUR: It could grip it by the husk!
GUARD #1: It’s not a question of where he grips it! It’s a simple question of weight ratios! A five ounce bird could not carry a one pound coconut.
ARTHUR: Well, it doesn’t matter. Will you go and tell your master that Arthur from the Court of Camelot is here.
GUARD #1: Listen, in order to maintain air-speed velocity, a swallow needs to beat its wings 43 times every second, right?
ARTHUR: Please!
GUARD #1: Am I right?
ARTHUR: I’m not interested!
GUARD #2: It could be carried by an African swallow!
GUARD #1: Oh, yeah, an African swallow maybe, but not a European swallow, that’s my point.
GUARD #2: Oh, yeah, I agree with that…
ARTHUR: Will you ask your master if he wants to join my court at Camelot?!
GUARD #1: But then of course African swallows are not migratory.
GUARD #2: Oh, yeah…
GUARD #1: So they couldn’t bring a coconut back anyway…
GUARD #2: Wait a minute — supposing two swallows carried it together?
GUARD #1: No, they’d have to have it on a line.

I continued on my hike as the sun started to dip lazily over the sea. I finally came to the end of the ridge-line where the trail stopped and the small outline of puffin island could be seen in the distance. It was a spectacular view that I savored for a long while before zipping my coat up and retracing my steps back to Conwy as the sun set over my shoulder.

I arrived back in town in the dark, completely and utterly famished, so I decided to splurge a bit and treated myself to a nice italian dinner at a place called Alfredos. The smalltown restaurant was warm and cozy with superb service, though I suspect that I may have been given some extra special attention because my comment about being a travel blogger might have been misinterpreted as me being a travelling food critic. Regardless, it was a savory and scrumptious meal that felt like a proper reward for my long day of hiking.

After the meal I wandered down the main road in search of a pub. I wound up in a place called the Albion Pub where a roaring fire and a roar of local laughter greeted me at the door. I sat down and ordered a pint of a local brew and struck up a conversation with the girl on the adjacent barstool. She was drinking whiskey neat from a sifter, which lead to us discussing our favorite whiskeys from around the world. When I revealed that I’d never tried Monkey Shoulder scotch, she ordered me a glassful before I could protest. I sipped it thoughtfully and nodded my head with approval. I returned the favor by ordering her a glass of Bulleit bourbon, a personal favorite of mine. Suddenly her boyfriend materialized at the bar, accompanied by his rugby teammates, and asked who her new friend was. I swallowed so loud I’m sure the sound of my adam’s apple dropping in my throat echoed across the pub. But inconceivably this was followed by astoundingly congenial introductions all around and a series of more free drinks. At one point I actually had seven different drinks from seven different people lined up in front of me. Now, rule number one of drinking is don’t mix your alcohols; stick to one spirit per night. But when the drinks are gifted to you by outrageously friendly (yet imposing) local rugby players, “No thank you” is simply not a valid response. There was a lot of singing and dancing in the pub that night, though the exact details are a bit hazy.

The next morning I woke up groggily in the hostel still wearing the same clothes from the day before. I made my way to the kitchen and made myself a pot of coffee as the sun streamed in blindingly through the floor to ceiling windows. I took the entire pot of coffee with me to the rooftop terrace where I met an middle-aged man sipping from a decidedly smaller cup of coffee. The man’s name was Paul, an English ventriloquist touring around Britain (you can’t make these things up). He had checked in late last night and was leaving in a few hours time for Chester, England to do his next show. Knowing that Chester was on the way to Liverpool, I asked if I could hitch a ride with him. Paul was happy to oblige and just like that I was on the road again!