Onegav

With Livvy out on a sleep over, we decided to take Izzy out today, and plan A was to go over to Llanberis, and have some lunch there.

Whilst there, I wanted to try and capture an image of the “lonely tree”. A really popular photography location, and I want to see what I can do there.

However, we weren’t long into our journey, when we realised the holiday traffic was going to cause us a problem. The sat nav was now saying over two hours to get there, instead of a little over an hour.

That wouldn’t normally be a problem, however we all needed to be back home by 4pm today, so time was against us.

So, we hatched plan B, and decided to take a trip to Llangollen, which is about 40minutes away, and on a course inland, so we would avoid the holiday traffic heading down the North Wales coast line.

Llangollen is a beautiful welsh village, famous, in my opinion, for its canal, steam railway, tea rooms and stunning scenery.

We were not to be disappointed! When we arrived we were all hungry, so we got the classic fish and chips and then went exploring.

We were hoping to show Izzy one of the steam engines, and luckily for us we happened on one by pure chance. The time table indicated we would miss the trains altogether, however as we sat eating an ice cream, the distinctive chatter of a train creeping into the station drifted over us.

We all hurriedly scampered into the station, and there next to the platform was a mass of people, all admiring the wonderful steam train that had just pulled in.

It looked wicked, it sounded amazing and it smelled like pure tradition.

We wandered around the train for a while, watching them fill it’s water tanks, and the guards ushering the passengers on board. It was brilliant, it just felt amazing to be there.

We wandered around the little town some more, admiring the views, and making note of things we’d like to do again, next time we visit. Izzy definitely wants to go on the train next time!

The surrounding hills and landscape of the area are breathtaking, and I tried a few different compositions to have a go at capturing it. If I’m honest, a lot of the images I took are a little too busy, but there was just so much going on, and the centre of Llangollen is so crammed with architecture and railways and rivers and tea rooms, that I guess that was inevitable.

The sky today was a real mixed bag, sometimes bright blue, sometimes very dark and moody. The images where I captured a combination of the two, I think work best, you can almost feel a storm brewing.

Learnings – Today was of course a family day, and photos were very much secondary; however both Holly and Izzy supported me as always in getting loads of nice photographs. I am as ever, truly thankful for their support!

It was great taking photographs today, because there was such diversity in what I needed to do with my camera. One minute it would be a steam train, then a hill side, then a really fast moving torrid river, then a tea room, then a moody sky, then a face full of ice cream.

It was a really enjoyable afternoon out, and if the rest of our two weeks off together is the same as this, it’ll be the best two weeks ever!