north Wales

Spent four days in north Wales last week. Rick seems to favor Conwy, and that is a beautiful town we visited twice, but I think Llandudno is the preferable base -- a bigger town with better travel connections and a wider variety of restaurants and accommodations. It's a very pleasant seaside resort, not at all tacky like one hears about Blackpool (or to use a mid-Atlantic US analogy, if Blackpool is Atlantic City, Llandudno is more like Rehoboth Delaware). Particularly recommend da Venezia restaurant, great Italian food and service. It's a small place that's popular so reserve (by email) as far in advance as possible. We did a day tour with a small company called Adventure Tours Snowdonia called "3 castles and Snowdonia" that was a good, efficient way to visit the Great Orme (headland near Llandudno), Conwy, Caernarfon (and a third smaller castle) plus Snowdonia park and a slate mine place, seeing in one day what probably would have taken us three by public transit, or having to rent a car. You can reserve this online and tour leaves from Llandudno station. Cost about 65 pounds p/p not including admission fees to the two castles (the third small one is free). You don't have to enter the castles on the tour if you don't want to; basically you have free time in Conwy and Caernarfon to do whatever you want before the tour van departs again. We went the following day on our own to Bodnant Gardens south of Conwy, a beautiful place especially this time of year. It can be reached by Arriva bus service from Llandudno, bus 25, but research time tables in advance for this as the buses aren't frequent on this line, only about every two hours. Buy bus tickets on board. Buses between Llandudno and Conwy town (route 5 and others) are much more frequent so you don't have to plan that as carefully. We then returned to Conwy the next day to see what we hadn't had time to do on our tour stop (which had been about 1 1/2 hours, plenty of time to see castle but not a lot else), namely, the Plas Mawr Elizabethan town house which I highly recommend. I'm not always a fan of audio guides but take advantage of the one here, which is complementary with your admission, as it's very well done. And finally, back in central Llandudno the Home Front Museum, a small private museum, is worth a visit to learn about the British home front in WW II especially in north Wales. Only takes about a half hour to see it thoroughly, price a reasonable 4.40. We liked Wales a lot.