I just got back to Cardiff on Friday night after an incredible 3 week spring break. So this post will probably be very long—these past 3 weeks have just been packed with so many great experiences of a lifetime!!!
I had my last class of the semester on April 15, marking the start of my spring break. The first destination of my break was to Corris, Wales with my entire Colgate study group. This is a really rural part of northern Wales, right on the edge of Snowdonia National Park. We left early Sunday morning, taking a beautiful 3 hour bus ride through Brecon Beacons National Park, one of the most picturesque places in Wales, to get to our primary destination of the trip, the Center for Alternative Technology (CAT). CAT describes itself as “Europe’s leading Eco center” and has over 7 acres of hands on displays and gardens, all of which are dedicated to teaching the public about sustainability. It was founded in the ‘70s during the oil crisis and now is a thriving educational center. We took a really cool, completely water and gravity-powered funicular car up to the site and then got a tour from one of the CAT engineers.
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| Gravity water-powered funicular tram. |
Everyone there was such a hippy but they are doing some really cool things in green development. The CAT sight is carbon-emission free, they have an extensive toilet composting system, a solar heating system, and design their buildings in a very eco-friendly way (sheep wool insulation, temperature-equilibrating mud walls, etc.). They have this really far-fetched plan to make Great Britain 0 carbon emission by 2030. This would require European flights to be reduced to 30% of their current usage, everyone would have to use wind turbines/solar panels, and you would basically have to bike everywhere and live on a farm…but they think its possible…After this tour, we got lunch in a nearby town and then headed to Corris, where we were staying for the night. Corris is the tiniest village you can imagine—our bus couldn’t even fit on the roads. It was extremely suprising this village had a hostel! We had a very relaxed remainder of the trip: we explored some local craft shops, admired some sheep, had a great homecooked meal by the couple who owned the hostel, and played a lot of games and drank tea by the fire.
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| Scenic Corris. |
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| With the sheep in our front yard. |
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| Our hostel is the one with the green fence. |
We returned to Cardiff the next morning. I had a few hours to finish packing up and then it was off to mainland Europe!
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