Today we went to Snowdonia – a beautiful national park which contains the tallest mountain in Wales. It was about a 1 hour drive to get from the house to Snowdonia but it only took about 20 mins to get from England to Wales…so crazy that they are different countries! It does feel a bit like a different country too because there are a lot of people speaking Welsh in Wales and all the signs have English and Welsh on them. On our drive in we could see some snow capped mountains which was pretty magical.  After a fair bit of driving we stopped at a lookout which had great views of the mountain range. Then we drove into a quaint little village - Betsw-y-coed - where we stopped for a hot chocolate but we downed it pretty quickly as we had Barnaby with us so we had to drink it outside in the cold. We went for a bit of a wander around the village. We even managed to find some windproof, waterproof gloves when we wandered into a couple of the many outdoors shops around. Calvin decided this is the place he would like live in - lots of outdoor pursuits to do! We then drove on a bit to Beddgelert and went for another wander along a river and through some kissing gates to find Gelert's Grave - the functional dog that got mistakenly shot by his master after he protected the master's baby from a wolf. It started to rain a but fortunately we had our waterproof gloves ready! And the rain didn't last long at all! We had a bit of a look around for somewhere to eat but a lot of the places were closed today. Then we gradually started driving home, on the look out for places to eat lunch / dinner that were dog friendly. So many pubs are actually dog friendly in England / Wales – it’s very different to Australia.  So we went on a pub crawl of a different kind – stopping in the carpark, checking if it is open, if yes then Richard running in and asking if they are still serving food and are dogs allowed. We stopped at quite a few places asking these questions but we didn’t find anything that met these criteria. We then decided that we would just go home and eat (luckily Fiona had bought Kate some crisps and Kate had brought an apple and chocolate with her as she could foresee hunger, so she was coping fine after a fair amount of snacking). Then, on our way home, as we were getting very close to exiting Wales, we had a thought. Why don’t we go to the pub we went to about a week ago with the Welsh family?! So Fiona quickly rang them and booked a table for '2 minutes away’. We had a delicious meal with Barnaby sitting so well under the table. Calvin and Fiona had Malaysian chicken curry, Richard had game pie and Kate had pork belly – everyone loved their meals. We declined dessert as we had a lot of leftover Christmas pudding at home. When we got home we got straight into the pudding (trifle, pannacotta, lemon tart, profiteroles) and played Bananagrams. Bananagrams is getting quite a workout these days.