WALES MISSION REPORT: Page 4
See how five of us might have been a little squished all fitting in that car? We're almost ready to move on out to Snowdon. I was feeling better after a good night's rest, so I told the group I was willing to try to take on the mountain, but they all decided that we could find other interesting things to do in Snowdonia National Park...
We've found it, at least! Here's the big viewpoint of Snowdon, which you can't actually see due to the cloud sitting on the top of it, but you can see Marcus sitting next to the Snowdonia sign. If you can't quite read it, you can click on the image for a closer view...
After breakfast where EVERYONE eats before climbing Snowdon, we decided to take the tour of the Dinorwig pumped storage power station that has been built completely underground and inside the mountain to preserve the natural beauty of the area. You can see that Welsh was on one side of the ticket with English on the other side...
Here's the pamphlet for the Dinorwig power station...What it does is take water from the lake, pump it up into a reservoir that is at a higher elevation, and stores the water up there until extra electricity is needed, when the water falls over the turbines, creating electricity. Since they keep it ready all the time, the extra power this station generates is up and running about 10 seconds after they get the call that it's needed. This is usually enough to take care of temporary power surges when the current network gets demand that is too high for their original estimates. It is too expensive to run Dinorwig as a primary power source, since they use the surplus electricity from the primary power stations overnight to pump the water back up to the higher reservior, but they are quite proud of their response time in a crisis, as you can tell by their multimedia presentation about the station!
As we were leaving the area, we stopped at this famous viewpoint to take some photos. It's probably just as well that we didn't try to take on Snowdon, since you can see that it never lost its cloud cover the whole day. Maybe next time...?
Since we had basically driven all over Wales in our journeys between campsites, I was able to see a lot of scenery I hadn't seen before. My first impression was that a lot of it looked like the general lanscape of Western Oregon, but with completely different flora. Anyway, we did have nice weather driving back to Didcot, and we stopped here to stretch, have some hot chocolate and use the restrooms. Anyone heard of Ty Nant water...?
WALES MISSION REPORT SUMMARY:
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