Dolgarrog; Monday, 26 August, 2024

I had a bit of a lie in and a later breakfast before checking out of the hotel and walking the mile or so through the village to the Conwy Valley Maze, located right on the edge of the village on the road heading to Betws.

The Maze brands itself as the largest garden maze in the world, and it’s certainly substantial. The maze itself houses a number of small gardens and lots of sculptures and art in the various dead ends and central points, so it makes more sense to deliberately take wrong turnings to see all the art that is located across the site.

Making sure that I’d seen most of the dead-ends, it took nearly an hour to complete the maze, which was pretty good timing as it meant by the time I walked the mile or so over to the station I only had about 10 minutes to wait for the train back to Llandudno Junction.

As it was a Bank Holiday I only had the choice of two trains. The 12:19 or the 15:21 with the latter then requiring a number of connections working correctly to ensure that I made it to Crewe in time for the 19:14 train that I had a train specific advanced ticket for. I’d decided that I’d rather have a relaxed trip so I’d opted for the 12:19 train and then spending a couple of hours in Chester – I had considered spending the time in Llandudno but didn’t want to risk connections not working later, and it was likely that the trains would be pretty busy at the end of a Bank Holiday Weekend.

The connection at Llandudno Junction worked without any issue and my gut feeling about how busy the trains would be turned out to be true as I was able to get a seat without a problem when I boarded, but pretty soon the train was filling up confirming my suspicion that later in the day would be worse.

I had a nice couple of hours in Chester having a late lunch and just a wander around the city, keeping an eye on the connecting trains to Crewe which appeared to be running fine.

I headed back to the station in time to catch the 17:54 train which would get me back to Crewe with just under an hour to spare, and that part was all fine, it was just the train that was coming up from London to form the return working was already running over 30 minutes late and it looked like it might be a bit of a painful journey back, but I hadn’t realised as I stepped off the train at Crewe at 18:18 quite how painful that would be.

Eventually the train from Euston arrived about 5 minutes after we were already supposed to have departed, but a quick turn around meant that we were only 10 minutes late leaving, however a couple of stops down the line at the first station with a short platform it turned out there was an issue with the train, it could only open all doors or just one door, so the guard had to get everyone to one door to let them on and off. As we pulled away the PA system decided to start to do an impression of a 1990s Modem trying to connect and then the onboard displays started merging words together on the display creating new town names and then making random announcements.

By the time we reached Rugby we were over 30 minutes late because of the issues and clearly the train crew had had enough so the train was cancelled and a full train was emptied out onto the platform and told to catch the train 30 minutes later (so the train an hour after ours). When it finally arrived, by pure fluke, the doors levelled up directly in front of me so I was the first on and able to grab a seat, but many people were standing all the way back into London, a full hour down the line. Certainly not the smooth relaxed journey home that I had in mind when I left the Conwy Valley Maze many hours earlier!