Here Be Dragons!

Grizzly celebrated his birthday at the end of last month.  He is now seventy-six years old.  Hanley Bear and I think this is why he knows so much about so many different things. 

The evening before Grizzly's birthday, we asked Polar if we could make him a cake.  We had a lot of fun mixing the ingredients together, although we really needed bear-sized spoons and whisks.  Polar put our cake in the oven for us and made us wait for almost a whole hour before we opened the door to see if it had cooked properly - and it had!  

Grizzly was very pleased with his cake and said we were very thoughtful little bears to make one for him.  In fact, he was so pleased that we were invited to go with him on his birthday holiday to Wales.  'If we're going to another country, will we need passports?' I asked Polar.

'Not to go to Wales, little bears,' she explained.  'It's a different country to England but still part of the United Kingdom.  Wales has its own language and its own flag.  You'll see it when we cross the border.  It has a red dragon on it.'

Polar explained that dragons were fierce, scaly creatures which could fly and breath fire.  Hanley Bear and I thought they sounded terrifying and decided we didn't want to go to Wales after all, but she reassured us that they only existed in stories and on flags and that we wouldn't see any real dragons. 

After an interesting drive across country, Hanley Bear and I started seeing flags and signs with red dragons on.  By then, we were getting hungry, so we were glad when Polar arrived at a handsome little town called Llangollen, parked the car, picked up our bear bag and took us into a long, thin café on wheels to have sandwiches and cake for lunch.  Suddenly, Hanley Bear and I heard a terrible whistling, shrieking noise from outside and a huge, dark shape passed the window in a cloud of swirling, grey smoke.  

'It's a big, black dragon!' I squealed to Hanley, struggling to get out of our bear bag and hide.  'Polar was wrong - they aren't just in stories, they're real!'  

'Eeeeeek!' went Hanley Bear, also trying to wriggle out of the bag. 

'Don't panic, little bears,' Grizzly said, calmly picking up our bag so we could see out of the window properly.  'That's not a dragon.  It's a steam locomotive!  It's going to pull a train and we're going to travel behind it, up the valley to Corwen and back.' 

Before we got into our railway carriage, Polar and Grizzly took us to the front of the train to have a proper look at the locomotive.  We could see that it wasn't a monster at all, but a very clever piece of human engineering.

We liked our railway carriage very much.  We promised to be good bears and not to run about, so Polar let us out of our bear bag for the journey.  The table doubled up as a bear seat from which we could enjoy a journey along the valley of the River Dee, watching people rafting and kayaking through the rapids, fishing or walking. 

At one point, we went through a tunnel.  One of the windows in our carriage was open a little bit and some steam came in and even when we came out of the tunnel, we couldn't see anything because the windows had steamed up, inside and out.  

When the steam cleared, we realised we had climbed high above the river.  Around us, the mountains got higher and the countryside wilder.  Hanley Bear and I decided that, whatever Polar said, there probably were real dragons living in caves up in the mountains, so we would have to be very careful if we ever went up there looking for a holiday bear cave.  

After our train journey, Grizzly and Polar took us to see the Llangollen canal.  They showed us where they had moored Uppie when they came to visit and we also saw some horse-drawn boats taking people on trips along the canal.  I felt a little bit sad, as it reminded me how much I was missing being a boat bear.  

The following day, we visited another steam railway in a town called Welshpool.  The engines were smaller than at Llangollen but still not small enough that we could help to drive them.  The route of this railway goes up and down some very steep hills and around some tight corners so, once the journey started, Polar suggested we stayed safely buckled in to our bear bag. 

 Some of the sheep and lambs in the fields seemed to think our train was a dragon and ran away from it but others were quite calm when we went past.  Hanley Bear and I waved to them but they didn't wave back. 

When we got to Llanfair, the Easter Bunny was giving out Easter eggs to all the human cubs.  We thought we might get a chocolate egg from the Easter Bunny too but, unfortunately, there were no little eggs for small bears.  

Hanley and I decided that we liked Wales and we liked steam engines too, and we really liked all the kind people who help to look after the trains, so we hope Polar and Grizzly will take us there again, either by car or better still, on Uppie.  We might even get to see our bear hero again!