Road tripping through wales. Part 1

It was July 2005 or maybe April and me and some friends decided to go on a road-trip through wales. The group consisted primarily out of me, Jurie, Jo and Jo's brother. Jurie I met at the British embassy where we were applying for our UK Holiday Visa's and we kept in touch and became friends. Me and Heath and him later had a house share together in South Fields in London. Jurie got me into the Hillsong church in London and I went to coffee with a bunch of the people where we met Jo. Jo's brother was living somewhere else in England so we didn't know him before the Holiday. So off we go to Paddington station, which is where we met up with Jo's brother. We were cutting it a bit close and we didn't really know how close until the train started moving just seconds after we boarded. So we paused a second to breathe a sigh of relief and then settled down for the trip to Cardiff. The trip was rather uneventful and not many people like reading about a train trip so... We arrived at Cardiff and now we needed our car. Much to our disgust the car rental place turned out to be quite a walk away from the train station. Over the river under a bridge (or no wait we thought we needed to go under the bridge) back through the station to the other side, over the river across the busy road and down it for a while. And finally the car rental place. On my walk however I noticed something. Now don't laugh but I noticed allot of red dragons. It was only later that I realized their flag actually had the red dragon on it. Something about it being good luck to carry a red dragon into battle. So we got our car, a nice diesel Volkswagen and off we went to... Erm well we didn't really decide that part yet. So I suggested we head West because I'd very much like to see Skomer island and a puffin. Which is as close to a cross between a parrot and a duck you can get. Or rather as close as I've ever seen. So off we went westbound. Our first stop was at the The Gower Peninsula. I'd lie if I said I didn't have to go look that one up on Google. It was rather unimpressive. We arrived there at low tide and the water was way back leaving only a muddy beach behind. So we took pictures and went back to where we illegally parked using a parking ticket we bought further down the coast.

So off we went, our next stop was Mumbles. Which is called that because the sailors back in the day thought it resembled a woman's breasts. I thought they seemed a bit uneven for that but I guess if you've been at sea for a couple of months...
Mumbles was a quite little coastal town with nice little cafes and lots of hills. On the top of the one hill lay Mumbles castle.
We had some lunch and sat on the hill overlooking Mumbles. Before heading off again.

As castles go Wales has got allot of castles. In fact as far as I know it has the most castles per square hectare in the world. We stopped over a bunch of them on our trip. I honestly can't remember the names of all of them. I know one of them was Carmarthen Castle and of coarse the Cardiff Castle. But after seeing about five of them if starts getting a bit much for one trip.




I read that three cliffs bay was a very beautiful place. So after driving up and down the same road about 3 times, with Buttercup Baby playing on the radio we finally found the path that would take us down to the bay. It was quite a walk along a long maze like passage all the way down to the coast with an occasional break in the foliage to get a glimpse of sheep farms down in a valley below. It was quite beautiful.
We eventually came to the end of the path and it was quite spectacular. Mostly for size but beauty was definitely also a factor. We never went down into the bay since it looked like it would take an hour to walk down there but we took a couple of photo's and just admired the view. If you click on the photo below and view it at a larger scale you'll notice someone walking on the beach inside the horse shoe shape of the lagoon, this is just a small indication of the size of the bay.