I grudgingly hit my alarm clock at 6.00. It was Saturday, and I was up before the sun. An hour and a half later, I was more or less awake and, equipped with my passport and railcard, was walking to the Bath Spa train station with a group of friends to catch the 8:06 to Cardiff Central. By this time, the sun was just breaking through the clouds and peaking over the hill; we were grateful for sunshine- it had been raining for far too long. We arrived at the station and I went up to the ticket machine. I swiped my credit card, and the machine asked me to enter my booking confirmation number. I hadn’t written it down and couldn’t pick up a WiFi connection to get to the email receipt. Fortunately, a friend let me use her phone, and I found the email and copied the number (after re-swiping my card as the ticket machine timed-out).

Tickets in hand, we checked the schedule to find our platform. That’s when we saw the dreaded C-word: CANCELLED. One of us walked over to the information desk, and they told us to get on a different train to Bristol Temple Meads and wait for another train there.

We walked up to the platform, only to hear this announcement: “The 8.30 service to Bristol Temple Meads has been delayed by 41 minutes due to flooding.” Eventually a train pulled into the station. The schedule said it was going to Bristol. But then a voice announced the schedule was incorrect and the train was going to Cardiff. It felt a bit like that scene in Skyfall where Q tells James to “get on the train!”

We were no longer stuck on the other end of the line and in a little over an hour arrived in Cardiff under astonishingly mostly sunny skies. It rains even more frequently in Wales, so to have blue skies was a miracle. It was really cool to see all of the public signs written in both English and Welsh and a street lined with Welsh flags, an epic white and green flag with a red dragon on it.

We started on a self-guided tour that brought us past a couple beautiful churches, the city hall, and a war memorial:

…and then just as we had passed the National Museum Cardiff it started raining. Thank goodness we weren’t on the guided tour; we could explore the museum until the weather improved. A friend recommended the natural history exhibit, where I learned that Great Britain used to be two separate islands that merged due to tectonic movements.

Following the tour, we enjoyed Afternoon Tea at Pettigrew’s Tea Rooms, alongside the park outside Cardiff Castle. I ordered a wonderfully fragrant peony and rose tea. (We need to add scratch-and-sniff to blogs; they may as well have put a flower bed in the teapot.)

Following this, we toured Cardiff Castle itself; elaborate as it was, it was not as extensive on the inside as one would expect, although the view from the keep is incredible.

We took a short train to Cardiff Bay, which is very beautiful at sunset:

and returned to the city centre for dinner. All things considered, we could not have asked for a better day, and thoroughly enjoyed the adventures we had together.

And the train back to Bath Spa was on-time.

Hwyl am nawr!

Location: Cardiff, Wales