January 2025 - New Year Kickstart

Well well, its 2025. It seems like yesterday that I was standing outside my house counting down into a new millennium and expecting the whole world to crash as computers globally failed to cope with the date change!

Well here we are, nothing happened, and 25 years have disappeared.

The Cross Foxes is doing well these days, we have many loyal followers and much repeat business. We think our offer is almost spot on. The model of attracting groups to hire the upstairs, often for a Friday and Saturday, has proved very popular and we had an excellent summer. Loads of fun and some really lovely visitors.

However, the costs and also the massive barriers to doing business in the UK mean we are always right on the financial edge. We face huge costs again this year in Council tax, VAT, electric and water to name just the big four.

We will be pushing activities to try and make the place an even busier hive of activity in 2025. 

Let us know your ideas and recommendations:

info@thecrossfoxes-trawsfynydd.com

What's on at The Cross?

First landmark is a weekend of gravel and mountain biking with likeminded individuals on Friday 24th January. If the weather stops us biking we will still get out and walk.

Come and join us on a guided ride on the Saturday and also if you fancy it, enrol for the whole weekend and get a super discounted rate on set meals and accommodation.

After that we have a visitor. Legendary cyclist Dave Lloyd will be coming along for a Q&A session, so what we want to do is try and gauge interest in this. Dave (wrongly I believe) thinks he’s too old for folk these days and they have forgotten or never knew about the old days. I believe he’s wrong, so drop me an email if you fancy this! Date to be finalised.

chrisw59@outlook.com

We became radio stars in 2024. I say we, but mainly Sarah who seems to have caught the eye of radio 2's DJ OJ Borg. He came out with pals and had a fine evening playing pool, darts and generally living it up.

Sadly for Sarah he is married with two kids, but then she is probably out of his league any way to be fair.

Maybe even bigger news is that Richard Gere, yes the film star, is getting all nostalgic in his old age and is thinking of popping to stay with us later in the year. He can’t recall for sure whether he stayed at The Cross Foxes in 1994 while filming First Knight but he knows he ate

there and recalls it as one of the best venues he has encountered in his modest and humble life. Again date to be finalised, just whetting your appetites.

Chef Ieuan is very well thought of. His food is excellent and he got some recognition of this at the Royal Welsh show when he placed third in a national cook off. I have probably got the details of this wrong but I can never get a Sunday lunch there as he is always sold out!

The Welsh 3000s on three Fridays. I have long admired the achievement of running/walking over the 15 Welsh 3000 foot peaks in one go. I’m not sure I could actually do it. To complete it inside 12 hours is considered extraordinary, after all its about 26 miles and involves about 14,000 feet of ascent. It involves crossing the three ranges, Snowdon, the Glyders and the Carneddau.

Unbelievably the current record set by Finlay Wild is 4 hours 10 set in 2019 when he beat Colin Donnellys superhuman 4 hours 19 set in 1988!

Why am I telling you all this? Well I am arranging an attempt to do the three ranges on three consecutive Fridays, fully planned, guided, transported and fed.

If you fancy joining me…. Drop me an email titled ‘3000s’ on

chrisw59@outlook.com.

That’s all for now, a nice brief one.