Today was the day I decided to give my Harley a blast through the beautiful Welsh mountains, I'm sure with open shorty pipes on it the local sheep will remember me for a long time!

The weather was perfect, 23c (74f), clear skies and little wind (the weather, not me). I gave the bike a good clean and polish before filling the tank and heading north, the traffic was minimal and no police helicopter in sight.

It was a great trip, about 300 miles in total, I stopped for a bite to eat and a cuppa at a locally famous burger van. Sitting on a pile of cut logs the view was amazing. I was actually looking down onto army Chinook helicopters dropping supplies for a training exercise, at least I hope it was an exercise. I swear my bike sounds like one of those things!, a point reinforced by a fellow resting biker.

Here's a view of the Brecon Beacon National Park in winter, definately not biking weather!

 After filling my tank, I filled both bike tanks and headed way up north through Wales to Snowdonia National Park. I had to wait for 20 minutes at one point to allow what looked like half of the British Army to cross the road, I counted 7 Challenger tanks and many more support vehicles. You'd think Osama Bin Laden was hiding in the Welsh mountains not in Afghanistan!

 After an hours riding I was in Snowdonia NP, again the views and weather were fantastic. I would have loved to have visited one ofthe slate mines in the area but I hadn't allowed myself the time to do so, another time maybe.

Snowdon is one of the most amazing places, undisturbed by towns and cities, just the odd little village built to support the now closed slate mining industry.

Here's a pic of Bethesda Slate Mine circa 1900, the largest slate mine in the world - ever!

After riding around Snowdonia for a while I decided to head back home, this was a spur of the moment trip so I hadn't done a lot of planning for it. I even forgot to take a camera so please accept my apologies for including images trawled from the interweb.

Snowdonia National Park - Wales, UK

 Tomorrow I head to the distant shores of that very foreign country - England! I'll take my camera this time and make a plan for the day.

My legs ache, my ass aches, my shoulders ache, my neck aches, I got hit in the face by a huge bug and got told off for having loud exhausts by a local village nonagenarian.

All in all - a near perfect day!

Rockman (mike)