Good morning!

Today was a day I was really excited about, because I got visit a new place in Great Britain that I’d been wanting to visit for a very long time: we went to Wales!

Specifically we went to Cardiff, and visited a smaller town and castle on our way back to Bath.

Today was another day of driving, and it was my first time on this trip driving in a major city. Which was a whole new experience.

It actually wasn’t too bad. The lanes were generous in Cardiff, and the Rick Steves guide directed us to a convenient and easy to use parking garage so we weren’t driving around looking for parking. Which eased the driving pain.

I’m not really sure exactly what I was expecting from Cardiff, but it was pretty fancy. I think I had assumed it would be more industrial, but the entire downtown shopping district has been revitalized in the past few years, and it’s pretty snazzy.

Oh wait, let’s go back a minute to breakfast in Bath before beginning our journey.

If you order “American Pancakes” in the UK, the things that you receive will not resemble pancakes we eat at home, but they will be delicious. Also “Bacon” is usually slabs of ham.

Ok, back to Cardiff.

We originally planned to visit Cardiff castle, but when we walked to it we found that it was closed because the band The Lumineers was playing a concert. Which would have been awesome to see if I had known. But it wasn’t listed as closed on their website so I had no idea.

A local shop owner told us that is has been closed most days over the past month as so many bands and musicians have been coming in this summer.

So no Cardiff Castle for us. Instead we pulled out my Rick Steves pages and did his Cardiff walk through the cute little lanes.

We found the Cardiff market, where local farmers, chefs, and crafts people sell their goods. It was mostly locals shopping at the market, but everyone was kind to us and we bought some lunch to take away.

I bought a Welsh pasty and some cherries, and we sat down in a park nearby to eat. At which point it started raining.

After slurping down our pasties, we ducked out of the rain and into a cute little historic church, with a rector who was very nice and has information up in the church about all of the things displayed.

The rain hadn’t quite let up when we left the church, but we made our way to the National Museum Cardiff, which had some nice medieval pieces and a shockingly good impressionist section, but very little art from Welsh artists, which is what we were hoping for. It was in a great building, and free, so definitely a worthwhile rainy day activity.

One of the cool things about Wales is that everything on every sign is in both English and Welsh.

I also found one of my favorite things I’ve seen all trip at a gift shop.

Despite the rain, in the short time we spent in Wales we saw a demonstration about Palestine, a Ukrainian culture celebration festival, a naked bike parade (shout out to my neighborhood at home which also has a famous naked bike parade, and lots of street performers.

We were having a great time in Cardiff, but we decided we couldn’t leave Wales without seeing a castle, so we took off and dropped in to Chepstow Castle as it was on the way to Bath.

Chepstow castle is in the cute little village of Chepstow, not far from the border between England and Wales. It’s the oldest castle in Wales, and is really just ruins now, but I love some moody castle ruins in Europe so I thought it was wonderful.

Get ready for a castle photo dump

Some things to note:

This door was found in the castle and is thought to be from the 11th century, making it one of the oldest doors in Wales.

Also, here’s a traditional historic toilet pic. No mannequins on this one.

More castle pics

Ok, enough pics of the very cool castle ruins.

The castle closed for the evening, so we headed out to drive back to Bath, but passed an Indian place on the way that looked good so we pulled in and decided to give it a try. We had a great view from our seats.

The place was called the Mango House, and the food was all good, but our butter chicken was strangely sweet. We joked that no matter what you order you get mango curry since you’re at the Mango House.

After that it was back to our place in Bath to pack up our stuff and get ready to leave the county of Somerset, and venture across the south of England to East Sussex, as our next adventure is to the coast near Brighton.

Goodnight.