The Top Floor Flat

My thought process this evening has gone something like this:

“I’m tired, I got back late, I should go to bed. Hmm, what’s this? I have no sheets on my bed? They’re still in the washer and we have no dryer? Wow, I guess I have more time than I thought while I wait for my bed to not be soaking wet. I guess I’ll finish my story of Wales on my blog.”

So here I am. I am quite knackered, though – between missing last Friday, last Monday and all of next week, I’m trying frantically to get everything up to speed at work. I knew I was going to be in the office late today so I offered to do the washing up (they always make the tea, and I never have to make the tea – it’s only fair when I’m around I do the dishes every so often!) and got so busy and distracted that I completely forgot I had offered and now I feel bad. This really has nothing to do with Wales. Point is, I’m distracted and tired so if this is more incoherent than usual that’s why.

On the morning of day three we all piled onto the bus for the last few stops. The schedule said that we were going to do more castles, but our guide Adam said that we had seen a lot of castles, and we’d see another before we left so he had a surprise that he thought we’d like better. As we left Abergavenny he explained that he was taking us to Pwll Mawr, or Big Pit, which was a museum dedicated to the mining history of South Wales. Like some parts of the US East Coast, South Wales saw a lot of towns grow out of the coal mining industry and thousands of men, women and children were employed in coal mines all over the country. Big Pit was once one of the largest working coal mines but has since been converted into a museum where you can don a helmet and lamp, climb into the cage and descend down the original 90metre mine shaft for an hour long tour through the mines led by a man who had worked in the mines while they were still active. It was absolutely amazing (and should you be thinking of heading to Wales yourself, it was, like many of the best museums in the UK, free) and so unique. It was hard to image that the tiny tunnels in which we found ourselves were home to 1300 men, as well as horses, dogs and children who helped out in the mines.

There were a number of other exhibits to see after the part of the tour in the mine finished but nothing really compared to being underground with one of the men who could speak firsthand about the experience. After Big Pit, we continued south towards Cardiff, although we didn’t actually go all the way to the country’s capital city (and important in my mind for its Doctor Who associations) because it would have been impossible to experience the city in an hour or less. Instead, we turned west before hitting the city and stopped at a place called Tintern Abbey which featured the ruins of Tintern Abbey, one of the Catholic structures that’s destruction was ordered by Henry VIII when he decided he wanted to start his own religion. It was clear that it had been a stunningly gorgeous building while at its height and even in ruins it was quite a sight.

We didn’t stay long although Adam suggested that we all do our kitschy Wales tourist shopping at the Tintern Abbey gift shop as it’d be the last one in which we stopped. I bought two little cookbooks of Welsh recipes including Welsh rarebit. Rarebit is compared by some to cheese on toast but is actually a cheesy bread baked with herbs and seasonings, and a variety of cheeses. It gets its name from when poor families couldn’t afford meat to feed the whole family and so when some meat was available, it was cooked into the bread, then the bread was chopped up and distributed to each member of the family. If you got the piece with meat in it, then you got the rare bit of meat – thus the name rarebit although it’s not generally cooked with meat anymore.

After leaving Tintern Abbey we headed to our final stop in Wales at a place called Chepstow which was right on the border of England, just over the river. There was a bridge with a sign in the middle indicating where the border of the two countries lay.

Chepstow also had a gorgeous castle and I found a nice trail that went around the whole thing – it was a huge castle, bigger than any I’d seen so far on the trip and probably almost a quarter mile long. There were people in costume getting ready to do a mock battle in full armour and everything but unfortunately we couldn’t stay as it was time for us to go back to London.

It was such a wonderful trip and I can’t wait to go back to Wales to do some proper camping. Now that I know a number of the towns at different parts of the country, I can catch a train and make my way along the same route we traveled, although possibly at a more leisurely pace. I met some very nice people, got a ridiculous number of photos including a decent number with me in them (the nice thing about traveling with a group is you can ask people to take your picture everywhere!) and discovered that Wales is exactly as wonderful as I thought it would be.

Whew, I’m dead on my feet so it’s off to bed, damp sheets or not. Up next… Paris!