While taking my time on the way back to the ferry from Derbyshire on a nice sunny morning, I found this place while quite lost. I was looking for a place to buy a sandwich and a cup of tea before hitting Holyhead for the ferry but that’s neither here nor there. For those interested in my sandwich and tea exploits, I did eventually find a shop with marvelously cheap & tasty sandwiches only about 5 mins from this spot. It struck me at the time that this was possibly the spot that Fran took some wonderful photos of the same bridge from recently. Or maybe slightly lower down. I wasn’t energetic enough to get off the bike and walk down the path.
This, of course, is the Menai bridge that links the island of Anglesey to mainland Wales. A much nicer sight than it’s neighbour down the river slightly, the Britannia Bridge. I could recite all kinds of wondrous facts and figures about it, but I guess if you’re bothered about that kind of stuff you’ll go to Google anyway.
Perhaps the most memorable part of my stop here was the look of utter disdain I got from an elderly gentleman as I stopped to take a photo. I’d get suspicious glances all the way through the process of putting the bike on it’s side stand, rummaging around in the top box for my camera, taking a couple of photos, stopping for a minute to appreciate the view (without the camera in front of my eye) and then repacking everything and getting back on the road. Perhaps I misread it? Perhaps seeing me arriving on a panzer, laden down with a holidays worth of dirty clothes and various trinkets was the most exciting thing that’d happened to him in weeks. Maybe months? I suppose I’ll never know.
As I so often tend to do these days, I also tried my hand at a quick panorama. This one is only about 8 or 9 photos, lovingly stitched together by the good people at Adobe and converted to black and white in Lightroom the only way I know how; Flinging sliders every which way until I see something acceptable. Rationalising the creation of these aspect ratio challenged jpegs, I often tell myself that ‘some day I’ll print a load of these and hang them up’. The walls will surely buckle under the weight of prints when I finally do get around to printing even a small percentage of my collection.
I have the greatest of intentions to start processing both Peak District and Yorkshire Dales photographs next weekend. The Peak District lot will be thin on the ground as I spent most of my time there on rocky dirt roads, wondering what the hell I was doing on rocky dirt roads.
