Wales - Day 2

We have a long day planned today, driving from South to North Wales with a couple of stops along the way.

The first stop is Strata Florida Abbey. Another 12ty century Cistercian abbey. There is much less of this one to see as compared to Tintern Abbey yesterday.  One arch and some partial walls, there is some interesting tilework in the remains of the chapels though.  The very nice lady at the visitor center is happy to answer my questions about directions to our next stop and also a scenic drive that I had read about. Thanks to her excellent detailed directions, we get straight to our next destination, the Devil's Bridge.

The Devil's Bridge is an 11th century bridge with an 18th century bridge built above it, and a 20th century bridge above that one. There are two trails here. We took the first trail, the waterfall trail. It goes down into the gorge and back up again with views of a long beautiful series of waterfalls along the way.  The trail has 675 steps and took us about 40 minutes to complete.  We met some nice people from Cornwall who were also hiking the trail and chatted with them for a few minutes. Everyone we have met in Wales has been so nice and so friendly. The other section of the hike is above the falls and gives you a good look at the three bridges.  We went down to see the bridges and then back up again. The day had started out cold and windy but we were definitely hot after all that climbing. We bought a couple of sodas and then headed back to the car for the scenic portion of the drive.

From Devil's Bridge, we took a small local road (recommended by someone on Tripadvisor and confirmed by the nice lady at Strata Florida this morning) to Cwnystwyth then on the mountain road above the Elan Valley. Wild and windy scenery, sheep and cattle loose on the road, it was a great drive and we both really enjoyed it. We kept stopping the car to jump out and take pictures. We made it to Rhayadar and joined up with a more major road (wide enough for two cars instead of one), and headed to Betws-y-Coed for our final destination and home base for the next two nights.