Travel Lodge  Porthmadog Wales

This was one killer of a day going from Goodwick to Porthmadog.   I can't even remember now how many different legs of the journey there had originally been when Marilynn booked the tickets.  Actually she has me do mine on my phone...ow as much as possible.  So I think we were catching a train just before 10 am in Goodwick.  The alternative would have been a series of buses, but from Fishguard Square which is about 3 miles away.  We had been having all sorts of difficulties trying to get a taxi to anywhere so we opted for walking back to the train station and taking the train.  Marilynn got a message yesterday saying that the last train leg had been cancelled so those tickets had to be refunded and new ones bought.  To save time we printed them out at the station when we went for dinner at the Rose and Crown not far from the train station. 

So we started on the train journey which took over an hour and ended up in something like Carmarthen.  We decided to go to a cafe across from the station.  I didn't want much to eat and was looking for a scone with jam, which they didn't have, but they did have toasted something with butter and jam.  I think I wanted tea with lemon and honey for my cough but got an herbal lemon and ginger tea which was OK.  When we went to try to find our platform and track, Marilynn noticed that there was no train with our time.  So we managed to find the ticket agent and found out that our next connection was a bus.  Now, was the bus late??  I can't be sure of any of this, and it was only yesterday.   The bus was a sort of local bus so we had to stack our bags by the disabled seats and even though there were not that many people on the bus originally, it did fill up as it rambled through the countryside and small villages and even some bigger towns. The bus was OK, I did enjoy the scenery but it was a bit more difficult to negotiate it than a train.

From there we went to look for our next leg's transportation and I think that it was a train, but a very short ride.  Or relatively short ride.  We had a very tight connection for a bus for the last leg of the journey.  As Marilynn was watching the time - she even has the train schedule - she discovered we had missed the bus at least 10 minutes before we arrived at the train station.  We managed to find a train ticket person who told us there was a train to where we wanted to go.  This train had supposedly not existed before or been cancelled.  So we were quite happy and went off to the track and waited - it was only supposed to be about 15 min or so but was almost a half hour late.  This made a very long day.  All these disruptions were due to the train strikes and also to a shortage of staff for the sames reasons we have in the US (Covid and inadequate raises).

Once on the train, we got off around 7 pm I think and checked into the Travel Inn which is on par with a Motel 6 but has the sink in the bathroom.  We do have a disability room.  We went for a walk to find dinner, but ended up walking the length of the main street and only finding a pub that had stopped serving food.  We decided to have drinks there - we both had Malbec wine - good for my cough.  Then we went back to the Travel Lodge but bought some food at an Aldi's supermarket.  Now I can't remember what we bought there since I had already bought some grapes, cheese and sweet chili rice crackers.  I wasn't thrilled with the crackers - they were much too salty.  We must have watched Midsummer Murders - at first I thought it was a repeat, but later it seemed as if it were a new one.  Then I went to bed - I was too tired to do any blogging - no, wait, I did start this one on TravelArk.