Once upon a time

There was a Welsh vacation, up in the high hills, for a girl and some hiking teammates. They all enjoyed the sunshine, and walked through the mist, and tramped over the hills, and camped by the rivers.

But for this one girl, there seemed to always be tickles round the corner of her memory, especially in the mist.
When she walked the trails up Cadair Idris, she wondered who had walked there before her, and what tribes had slept in the fields where she and her team slept each night.

Once she saw a heron perching on a bank, lazily watching her and her friends as they walked a path where the old railroad used to trace the land's curve. There were seagulls at Barmouth, playing tag in the sunlight as she warmed toes in the hot sun with the others. Their group, tracking small bits of peat moss and mountain grass over the cobblestone streets, had walked into a small store and bought fish and chips, from a row of nondescript buildings that gradually stretched into prettier Victorian homes up the coast.

They carried on from there, reluctantly stuffing sandy feet back into hiking boots and pulling their heavy packs back on. They camped, and marched, and rock climbed; they joined with other groups, split off again. They forded streams, spent nights under the stars, hid faces from the rain that dogged their way and stripped off outer layers when the sun welcomed them into new mornings and roads. And eventually they circled back to where it all began, on the hills overlooking the Avon Dyfi, or River Dyfi. They dropped their packs for the last time at Aberdovey, up above the Outward Bound Training School, and the girl wondered at all the ground they'd covered. When she held the grimy map, she traced the way they'd gone all around the northern part of the country, and all the big places marked, and all the small memories unmarked. Llyn Cau, a turquoise surprise of a lake, where one teammate had twisted an ankle. An anonymous bog valley where they'd pitched tents on the softest moss imagineable, and played cards all one morning while a storm blew around and slower teams tried to catch up. The mountainside where they'd paused to eat, and to look out across the sea as far as they could through the curious mist. The roads that passed equally calmly through little houses with laundry outside, to fern forests where any moment a harping bard or wolf might casually cross the path.

She folded up the map. Maybe she'd be back in Wales some day. Maybe not. But the memories don't go away so easily, and they find their way into other places and stories in sweet odd ways, magical Cymru....