Chauffeur Services in Caernarfon

Two roads take you into the mountains: the A487 south towards Porthmadog and the A4085 through Beddgelert, both single carriageway with long stretches where overtaking makes no sense. On a clear summer Saturday they carry every walker in the north, Pen-y-Pass has filled its car park before eight, and shuttle traffic below Llanberis crawls along. That goes into the timing, and we often propose an early start, which is pleasanter as well as faster.

Winter asks different questions. Snow lingers at Pen-y-Pass and on the road across to Capel Curig long after the coast has cleared, while the exposed sections above Rhyd Ddu catch the wind badly. Closer to home, anything bound for Anglesey and Holyhead pinches at the Britannia Bridge, and a restriction there pushes the lot onto the older suspension bridge. Before an early departure we check them both.

On a long journey, Britain's weather does more damage than its traffic ever will. Winter afternoons close in early, and that matters a great deal when the final leg is a single-track road. Highland and moorland routes can run substantially longer than any summer estimate suggests. Those allowances go into the timings from the start, rather than being discovered together halfway up a glen. Where a departure hour makes the schedule uncomfortable, we propose a better one.

Demand tracks the calendar closely. Bank holiday weekends fill fast, so do the weeks either side of Christmas, the summer wedding season and those university terms that all begin and end together. The further from London a journey runs, the sooner a car wants committing to it. Midweek travel in the shoulder months, by contrast, is the easiest thing in the world to arrange.