the long and winding road

Dragged back to reality sooner than expected, but here's some highlights:
a)The Traffic Jam





From the driver's side; and the other side. When the main highway has only two lanes, roadworks are not easy.

b) Ye Famous Castle


Not quite as the postcards show it; got lashed with rain and hail taking this.
But after a pitstop for some compulsory cranberry juice on the jetty across the water, it looked a bit more like itself:



c) Narrowing Horizons
Go further north and the road is single track with passing places, and lunatic tourists stopped there to take photos



d) View from the bedroom window



e) Paper chase
Not that I needed to nip out for the papers - the hotel had plenty but I went anyway. A 22-mile round trip completely on single track road.



Hotel was empty, which was quite creepy. First night only two rooms in what is a Victorian country house were occupied, and the staff don't sleep in!
But I, finally, read The Time Traveler's Wife, mostly curled up on a couch at a roaring fire in an empty lounge looking over the water. Heaven.

An' the dawn comes up like thunder

And that was from the bedroom window just after 8am on Wednesday. At 10am when I
headed out for the papers I was sandblasted by rain and the mountains were invisible through the mist; and when I found a quiet spot to read the papers:


the snow had arrived.

(And I was still short of one paper: the Radio Times. In a hotel notoriously famous for not doing television? But hotel famous for not doing television surprisingly had wi-fi and I'd been on LJ and was desperately hunting a Radio Times. Found it many, many miles later.)