(The subtitle of this post could be “…Prior To Almost Missing The Train To The Right County,” but the latter is a less interesting story).
Finding myself with an unexpected four-day weekend, I impulsively searched “North Wales” on airbnb. I found a lovely room in a cottage in Llanbedr DC hosted by an archaeologist named Gillian who happens to specialize in prehistoric archaeology and live across the street from a hillfort (as Mom put it: “You had me at hillfort.”)
Corresponding about the last-minute booking, Gillian suggested that I take the train from Cardiff to Wrexham and then the bus from Wrexham to Llangollen, where she curates the tiny local museum. We could meet there and she could drive me back to her place when she finished work.
This sounded like an intelligent plan, but since I promptly forgot all the place names involved, I GoogleMapped the route. Contrary to Gillian’s advice, there appeared to be a direct train from Cardiff to Llanbedr.
Now, I’ve learned the hard way that when a local tells you to go counterclockwise around the castle, you go counterclockwise around the castle (readers of “How Luck, Quick Thinking, Paganism and the Kindness of Many Strangers Saw Me Through To The End Of My Vision Quest” will recall the exact circumstances of this lesson). So I ran my travel plans by Gillian. She warned me that I was looking at the wrong Llanbedr.
It was only much later, after I successfully completed the Cardiff-Wrexham-Llangollen leg of my journey, met the delightful Gillian, and made it safely to Llanbedr DC (Llanbedr-Dyffryn-Clwyd) that I learned what had gone wrong with GoogleMaps.
As Gillian explained to me, it has to do with Welsh place names. “Llan” means church (which is why so many Welsh place names start with Llan-) and -bedr is the Welsh name for Peter. So there are probably dozens of St. Peter’s Churches across Wales. St. Peter only knows where I would have ended up.