caernarfon other ice-cream, please?

While the Snowdon day was very much the focus and highlight of the trip as far as I was concerned, we did do some other stuff while we were there, edited highlights of which are below:

• We went up the road (only 15 minutes drive away) to Caernarfon Castle, which is tremendously impressive, largely intact, full of exciting little nooks and crannies to explore and towers to ascend, and, crucially, free to enter for Cadw members. It was also known to the kids from having seen it feature in an episode of GoJetters back when they were much smaller. 
• We went to Anglesey for an afternoon including a quick visit to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch - a blatant tourist trap, to be sure, and the super-long version of the name is largely a Victorian conceit, but it's a bit of fun and provides an irresistible opportunity for a photo under the railway station sign and the purchase of some souvenir T-shirts and/or key-rings and/or fudge.

• In order to get to Anglesey we went in over the Britannia Bridge (which carries the main A55 road as well as the railway line) and back out over the Menai suspension bridge. The latter is older and more architecturally striking, but the former has the more interesting and chequered history, originally carrying a pair of wrought-iron tubes that housed the railway but then falling victim to a catastrophic fire in 1970 which fatally compromised the strength of the tubes and necessitated a rebuild with a different design, making use of the original bridge pillars and re-purposed as a combined road and rail bridge.
• We didn't actually go into Beaumaris Castle but did have a bit of a wander round its outer walls before getting bored and going and finding an ice-cream. It's comparatively small and rounded and cuddly compared with the harsh sharp-cornered polygonal gigantitude of Caernarfon Castle.
• Anyone buying an ice-cream from the Red Boat ice cream parlour and thinking of taking it out towards the pier to eat it will be warned by the people in the shop to watch out for predatory dive-bombing seagulls, and they are not joking; no sooner had Nia had a few licks of her mint choc chip cone with white chocolate sprinkles than some homicidal freakin' albatross attacked her and nicked the whole thing. I recall being menaced by similar large sharp-beaked bastards while trying to eat some chips on the beach at Porthcawl many years ago; evidently they enjoy a varied diet.