Cardiff Chronicles

After leaving Windermere and the Lakes District, we hopped on a train to check out Cardiff, Wales before our next house sit in Moreton-in-Marsh, England. We had some quick train changes in a couple of locations, but we lucked out and made all of our connections. In Cardiff, we stayed at a newer hotel close to the station and the Millenium Stadium.

For our first 1/2 day outing, we set out for the visitor info center near Cardiff Bay. Cardiff Bay is a gorgeous area where we saw some lovely buildings — the Millennium Building (in which the visitor centered was housed), The National Assembly Building, Roald Dahl Plass (Roald Dahl was born in Wales and baptized in the Norwegian Church which is now also located along the bay.), the Pierhead Building, a merry-go-round, and lots of retail and restaurants. After picking up area info, we took a 45 minute cruise around the harbor to give an initial overview of the area. We made our way back to the city center and began to see why Wales is known as the city of arcades (covered area between buildings with shops) as we passed at least 4 or 5 of them in our little walkabout.

We began our first full day in Cardiff walking a few blocks to a castle. Cuz it’s Great Britain, and you can stumble over one of these almost everywhere. We didn’t join the bus loads going in, as it was a bit pricey, but we did explore the very large Bute Park that abuts the castle and runs alongside the River Tath for a number of miles. To enter the park, we walked along the wall of animals that surrounds the castle — a series of different animal sculptures that sit atop the stone wall guarding the castle. After walking much of the park and watching the other pedestrians and cyclists using the park as well as the ferry boats cruising the lake, we walked over to Town Hall to see the building and nearby park. We also got to see a couple of newlyweds coming out of the building! We stumbled on a couple of markets in the city center — a lovely Mediterranean one (food only) that was outside and occurs just on Saturday and an indoor market that sells produce, take away food, and home goods that is open everyday. At night, we caught a bit of the Leicester soccer game that was the official end of the season, although they had already won the championship based on points.

Our second (and final) full day in Cardiff was the best-weather day yet. I believe it reached a high of 79 F. We had reserved bikes the prior day and picked those up about 9:30 for a full-day rental. While the bikes were of borderline quality, they managed to get us around. We biked out of the city to see two more castles — Castle Coch (long slog uphill for the photo op) just outside of Cardiff and Caerphilly Castle in the community of Caerphilly which we paid to explore. The best part of our journey was that the out leg was primarily uphill (though it didn’t really feel like it), so the return leg was downhill — almost all the way back to Cardiff! We wanted to continue our adventure, so we followed the bike paths back to Cardiff Bay to further explore the area. Everyone had the same idea, as it was so nice out, so we got lots of people watching in as well. Awesome, awesome day!

The next day we caught a crack of dawn train (5:12am!) to head to Moreton-in-Marsh for our current house sit. We had a lovely transition with our host couple and met their Pug, Daisy, before they headed to London to fly to Japan. More on the house sit and the Cotswolds in the next blog.