Sunny Llanddwyn trip

The first day after my two weeks of jury duty would actually be a field trip. This was the second one in the series; Dei and Jaco had done the first one without me while I was in court. Normally, the first trip is Llanddwyn, but there had been some logistic reason why they had gone somewhere else. So now the second trip would go there. And it's a lovely location.

There was a complication; timetabling had put a lecture to all MSc students in my diary, at 9 o'clock on the same day. Normally they won't double-book you, but this time they must have missed something. And they couldn't move it. It is difficult to get all MSc students together! So we reached a compromise: Dei would pick up the students on his own, and start without me. Straight after my lecture I would jump into my car and follow. I figured he wouldn't manage to get past the pillow lavas (the first outcrop) before I would appear.

It went as predicted. After my lecture I hot-tailed it to Newborough, parked up, and started walking. Once I got to the beach I could see a group of people in the distance, with one of them in a hi viz jacket. That must be them! They were indeed walking between clumps of pillow lava. And I caught up with them when they had only just started to look at one of them in detail.

Pillow lavas on the beach

Dei dealt with the pillow lavas and the nearby peperite.  Then we went to see some sedimentary rocks that had seen quite some stress; I dealt with these. We had lunch on the next beach along, where there were more heavily  altered rocks. I talked about a clump of limestone, and then we went to the pièce de résistance at the far end of the island: the type location for mélange. That is a spectacular site. 

Then we were done. And in the gorgeous weather, we walked back to the vehicles. Trip done! And it had been very pleasant. We had been lucky!