WALES...

We had planned to spend one night in Wales at Holyhead Port.  BUT, the only glitch that happened on our trip was this one.  We got notified from Irish Ferries that our afternoon ferry ship was experiencing technical problems and we were advised to go on the earlier ferry.  Unfortunately, that was at 8:30 a.m. and we would have to get up and leave our hotel in Athlone at 5:30 a.m. because we needed to drive to Dublin and return the rental car, then get an Uber to the ferry port.

It all worked out, but since we were arriving in Holyhead before lunch we just decided to spend a couple of hours there, then catch the train on  in to London.  My main objective was to see this in Wales -

IS THIS NOT THE COOLEST LIGHTHOUSE YOU'VE EVER SEEN?

South Stack lighthouse is actually on a little island - you walk down the steps on the cliffs 417 steps, then cross a little bridge to it.  It's over 200 years old and quite an amazing feat when you think about how difficult it was for them to get the materials down the cliffs and build it on that spot.  

I had to do some very strong suggesting to the Hubs to get him to do this.  He really wanted to be on the 2:00 train to London.  I got in the rental car line and he went outside to see if there were any taxis available.  The taxis weren't plentiful but a couple did come.  We were going to store our luggage in the train station but there was note on the door that said "back in 20 min."  We had a jovial taxi driver named Wayne and I asked him if we could store our luggage in his taxi and could he come back and get us in an hour???  He agreed and we totally trusted him to this agreement.  

We enjoyed the hike, yes, I'd call it a hike 834 steps down and back up.  We also paid and went inside and up into the lighthouse itself.  They did have some historical things inside but we really didn't have much time for that.  There were also puffins nesting on the cliffs and beautiful coastline views.  

At the end of this day we were pooped!  We had driven our rental car back to Dublin, taken 2 taxis, 2 shuttle buses, 1 ferry, and a train to get to London!  Whew!