In a blog post written yesterday, Yorkshire Pudding mentions going to Llandudno in Wales for the weekend. "Yay!" said I to myself - because I remember the place, from having visited it some 50+ years ago, on one of our family holidays in Britain back in my teens. I wasn't quite sure whether 1971 or 1974 though (we visited Wales on both those trips), so I had to check my photo albums. It turned out to be in June 1974.
The colour photos and postcards glued into my album half a century ago have no doubt lost much of their original colours; but I decided to copy them with my camera, do what I could with them in Picasa3 (the simple photo editing software I've been using ever since I first started blogging - which is almost ancient history in itself now), and use them for a Sepia Saturday post.
This view of Llandudno, with the long beach, matches the memories that came up in my brain as soon as I read the name.
My dad was a big railway enthusiast, something that also very much had its influence on what places we visited on our travels in Britain. In Llandudno, it wasn't a steam train that took us up in the mountains on the Great Orme Railway, though, but a tram. Checking Wikipedia now, I see that nowadays it is indeed called the Great Orme Tramway; and that this was also it's original name. But between 1932-1977, it was known as the Great Orme Railway (cf the postcards above) - until 1977, when the name was changed back again. According to Wiki, it is Great Britain's only remaining cable-operated street tramway, and one of only a few surviving in the whole world - and "still open seasonally from late March to late October, it takes over 200,000 passengers each year from Llandudno Victoria Station to just below the summit of the Great Orme headland".
Maybe a more recent visitor to Llandudno can provide information about how much the price for a trip up to the Summit has gone up since 1974??
A photo obviously taken on our way UP...
A 1974 Sepia version of yours truly, up on the Summit.
On the hill in the background, people had used white stones to create huge images/patterns/letters/messages, visible from afar. Does anyone know if they are still there? (I know that hill figures, and especially white horses, are an old tradition in Britain; but a quick google search I did now didn't mention Llandudno in that context.)
My parents and brother standing outside/below what I assume is probably the hotel where we were staying. (No note made in my album about its name, and that sign on the wall isn't readable.)
Linking to Sepia Saturday 769
