Castles and Pirates

We've been on holiday, of which more later.  On my birthday, as it happened, we went to Conwy, to see the walled town and the castle.  As we arrived we saw a couple of people dressed as pirates and imagined they were off to a party.  The further we got into town, the stranger it became - a larger number of people dressed (some quite convincingly) as pirates.

[Incidentally, what makes a pirate costume?  Parrot and pegleg are cliched and were relatively rare, but many of the people were unmistakenly pirates even without these.  We reckon that it's basically "historical plus hat".]

Anyway, it turned out that Conwy was having a pirate weekend.  Of course.  Most of the shopkeepers had dressed themselves and their windows in pirate garb, and there were various pirate activities going on.  Marisca, Elspeth and Tom partook of a swing boat, but that was about the extent of our involvement as Marisca declared that she didn't like pirates.  She definitely liked swing boats though.

I later (just now, while researching Conwy pirates) discovered that I had snapped a picture of the Best Pirate Wench winner (historical plus hat, note).

While dodging rain showers we took a turn around the castle - a nice example of what it is.  Conwy is kind of littered with good bits of building, being an old town, and I liked the Telford suspension bridge, although time, tired children, and rain stopped us from investigating much farther.