A great sunny day, and a real treat for our quick trip through Snowdonia. We spent the morning in the forests around betws-y-coed, then up into the highlands of Snowdonia with its open moorland. The roads continued to be interesting, very narrow and bordered on each side by stone walls, leaving us only a few inches to squeeze past other traffic.

In the afternoon we got to the city Carnarvon and before we knew it we were parked in the old town square; the truck looked more than a little oversized beside the other small vehicles in the square. It did not take long for a local to warn us that we would get a parking ticket if we parked for long so we moved to a nearby parking lot.

With the truck suitably parked we spent a couple of hours touring Carnarvon Castle and learned about the efforts by the English Kings to establish the legitimacy of their rule over Wales.

From Carnarvon we started the trek north towards Scotland (this is definitely a bit of a flying trip to the UK) and parked in a truck stop for the night.

You may have noticed that I have mentioned the narrowness of British roads quite often in recent entries. Well in our afternoon travels today we had an experience that is pretty much the poster child for this issue/topic.

From Carnarvon we decided to drive over the Menai Suspension bridge (which crosses the Menai Strait between Wales and Anglesey) near the town of Bangor. We devised a route that would take us westward to Anglesey over the Britannia (1850) and allow us to return to Wales via the Menai Bridge(1826).

Between the two bridges we stopped at a lookout for some photos and noticed that traffic on the Menai Bridge seemed very slow, though we could not see any traffic issue that would explain the slowness.

However, when it became our turn to cross the suspension bridge the cause of the slowness became apparent. The vehicle roadway passes through arches in the suspension bridge towers (see the second last photo) and the width of that arch is only 2.6 meters. To put this into perspective:

  • A typical US motorhome is 101" wide (that is 2.56 meters)

  • A typical shipping container is 2.5 meters wide

  • Our truck (not including mirrors) is 2.46 meters wide

So our truck was only 5.5 inches narrower than the arch, and a typical truck carrying a container is 3.9" narrower. We further discovered that with our mirrors extended in their usual driving position we are more that 2.6 meters wide.

That explained the slow traffic. Interestingly this obstacle was NOT identified in the UK truck atlas that we have, that purports to identify all trucking obstacles (height, width and weight) in the UK. That is because the maximum allowable width (not counting mirrors) for a vehicle in the UK is 2.55 meters. Thus the bridge provided 0.05 meters of extra space (1.95 inches).