Castles In Swansea And Bridgend, And Losing My Bag

I had been thinking about taking a day trip somewhere from Cardiff. I had missed the organized bus tours. There don't seem to be many from Cardiff, and the ones I looked into were already full.  The only ones I was interested in were the tour to castles and Roman ruins, and the tour to the beautiful beaches on the Gower Peninsula. Since the tours were all fully booked, if I was going to do any kind of journey, I'd have to do it on my own, either by public bus or train.


I met a woman named Eva at the hostel. She was in Cardiff for a TV shot at the BBC studio. She worked on the support crew, but in the course of the shooting,  she had gotten cast as an extra, as a patient. She showed me a picture of herself as a patient on the show. Cool. Anyway, we ended up taking at the bar; I told her I was thinking about gong to Swansea the next day, and she suggested I visit Bridgend.


The next day, I set off on my day trip.  Eva texted me as said she had talked to someone from the area, and they knew of a bus, but I told her I had just bought a train ticket online. So I went to the train station, and took the train from Cardiff to Swansea in Wales, and spent the day wandering around the centre of Swansea. Swansea is renowned as the home of Dylan Thomas, and of Pete Ham of Badfinger.


Then I decided to take a bus to The Mumbles to wander around there, and also to check out Oystermouth Castle. So I found out that I could take the 2B bus from the center of town to The Mumbles. I rode the bus, checked out the beautiful beaches and hills, and wandered through the castle. After I had left the castle and I was heading down the hill, I noticed that a bag I had full of snacks was missing. I thought I might have left it in a room in the castle where they showed a short video about the castle and its history. So I headed back to the castle and looked around that room, but no luck.

It wasn't the biggest deal to be missing the bag. It was only a few items of food, and the bag itself was not very expensive. But it was a really cool bag to have for travel. It was just a durable woven plastic sack with two drawstrings on either side, and the drawstring cords were connected to eyelets at the bottom of the bag, so they could be used as straps to be worn as a backpack or a frontpack. The whole bag folded down to take up almost no room at all, and I could keep it in my pocket or fanny pack.


So I must have left it on the 2B bus. And I did remember taking it off my back so I could sit on the bus without squishing my food. There was another 2B bus coming in just a few minutes, so maybe it would be the same bus, and by some miracle, maybe it would be on that bus. But I got on the bus, and it was a different bus driver, who had no idea about anything regarding my missing little bag.


But then an elderly couple on the bus were waving at me, trying to get my attention. They said that they had been on the previous bus, and a lady tried to wave me down as I was getting off the bus to let me know that I had left my bag behind, but I didn't see her, and she had turned it in to the bus driver. They said my bag would be at the station's lost and found!


They took me to take the bus to the station with them and they would show me where the lost and found office was. So I walked with them, they showed me where to go, and I went to an office that said to ring the bell for service. I rang the bell several times, but got no answer. I waited outside the office for a bit, and kept ringing occasionally. Finally a voice came over the intercom briefly, saying that they were dealing with an emergency, and I'd have to call back later. I said I was right outside the office waiting, and was leaving Swansea soon. They said to try again in ten minutes.


So I tried again in ten minutes, several times, and got no response. I decided to try the information counter, and the lady there said that all she could do was call them; I told her I couldn't do that because all I had was a US number. So she tried a few times, and didn't get an answer either. I walked around the town a bit, and came back, and tried a few times more, and somebody answered the phone. I inquired about my little bag, and they checked on it. They came back and said that it wasn't at the station, but it was still on the bus, which would be arriving at the station in an hour.


So it looked like all I had to do was wander around Swansea a bit more, and maybe I'd be reunited with my bag. Oh, well, there are certainly worse fates than having to sightsee some more while waiting. I checked out some more sights, and then returned to the bus bay and waited for the bus. Finally, the 2B bus arrived. This was the moment of truth. 2B, or not 2B? (sorry, I just had to throw that in). I boarded the bus, and there was a different driver, so my hopes were dashed. But then she asked me if I was the one looking for the bag, and I responded gleefully,  "Yes!" Then she handed it to me. Yay! Reunited with my little bag of snacks, and a story to tell about it to boot.


I took the train back to Cardiff, but thought to ask one of the station officers if it was OK to stop in between. She said, "Yes, wander, explore!" I looked it up online and after you validate your ticket, you have three hours to complete your journey, but after the three hours, they'll still let you complete your journey; you just have to do it through a person rather than an automated ticket reader. So I stopped at Bridgend, about halfway back to Cardiff, on the way, and wandered for a couple of hours.  There was a castle there, Newcastle, which was closed for the day, but at least I managed to get a picture. Then I headed back to Cardiff.


I spent the night at the hostel, went for my last walk to explore Cardiff, and now I'm on a train heading to Manchester, England, to seek my next adventure. I'll miss Wales, though. For some reason, I find it oddly soothing and comforting to see these weirdly foreign words all over the place, and to hear people speaking a vastly alien Celtic gutteral language where almost nothing is understandable, but every once in a while a vaguely familiar word slips through. If I were to stay in Wales for a while, I would surely study this fascinating language. Goodbye, Cymru.

Vaccinations In Cardiff And Other Sundry Items

I was wandering around in the centre of Cardiff, Wales, when I saw a sign at a outdoor goods store (A place sort of like REI in the US, it was called Cotswolds Outdoor) for a travel clinic. So I went in to check it out since I probably need some travel inoculations.



I inquired into the Japanese encephalitis vaccination, but they didn't have it as there is currently a scarcity. But when they have it, it is £75 a shot, and it is a two-shot course. That is a tremendous savings over what it costs in the US. In the States, it is about $400 a shot, but you might be able to find it for as low as $350.  Last time I traveled around the world, I just went without most of the vaccines I should have gotten, primarily because of their expense. But this time I will try to find places in Europe where I can get vaccinated, because it is much cheaper.



I wasn't able to get the Japanese encephalitis vaccine, but I did get inoculated for tick-borne encephalitis, which is a three-course shot (though two courses will give you most of the protection), and a yellow fever vaccine, which is only one shot. And I got a yellow fever vaccine certificate. In the States, the yellow fever vaccine is at a shortage, and the pharmacist who gave me the shot told me that they are giving shots that are one-fifth the potency in the US because of the scarcity. Here, I got the full vaccine, which confers lifelong immunity.  Not bad for just wandering by.



The pharmacist at the travel clinic gave me the names of a couple of other places, Boots and Superdrug, where there were travel clinics that might have the Japanese encephalitis vaccine. But I checked those places out, and they did not seem very user-friendly. Superdrug was just a locked door that said you had to make appointments online, and Boots only had eye and dental clinics, as far as I could tell.



So I'll eventually have to find places to get the rest of these shots. They are not terribly cheap, but are still a fraction of the price they would be in the US. I bet they are cheaper in some places in Eastern Europe.


After getting vaccinated, I came back outside, and it was cold and rainy again. I just didn't have the appetite at the time for walking around in cold rain (though I've done that a lot lately), so I ducked into a mall for a while. I'm not proud of that. But you can walk around without getting rained on, and they have places to hang out, drink coffee, and get wi-fi. So I sat in a coffee shop for a while, and, lo and behold, when I entered, the sky was completely blue with not a cloud in sight! But I came out and walked around for a few and then suddenly realized it was completely overcast again, and I hadn't even noticed that happening.


Most of the day I just spent aimlessly ambling, without even looking at a map. Then I saw the walls of Castle Cardiff and decided to check it out. So I wandered around in there for a while.


I headed back to the hostel before the sun went down. I had bought a falafel wrap, and I brought it with me and saved it for later. The hostel is kind of out of the way. It's not terribly far from the center of town, maybe about a half hour's walk, but it's location is just kinda weird. It's right near a major intersection that is difficult for passengers to cross. As a matter of fact, there is only one way to cross to get to the hostel, and I had to beg a local to show me were it was after several unsuccessful attempts that led to dead ends or shunted me down long corridors going the wrong way (but, to be fair, if I had walked another 100 yards or so, I probably would have found the crossing on my own). So there is only one way out of the hostel, as it is fenced in and/or surrounded by impassable traffic. One of the cross streets it is on has no pedestrian traffic on it, so you can't go in two directions at all. Once you get out the one way you can go, you can go in two directions when you get to the street: toward town or away from town. And away from town is pretty uninteresting for as long as I've taken the time to walk it, with the exception that there is a Lidl grocery store just a few minutes away in that direction. But most of the stuff is the other way. This means you can't just take a short walk to go anywhere (except for the Lidl); you really have to commit to going to town or through town.


Ugh, pictures are loading slowly again on FB. Have to sleep soon and still don't have a lot of pics loaded from the day yet.

From Bath To Cardiff, With Lots Of Stops On The Way

I woke up the day after checking out the Roman Baths, and took a bus to Stonehenge and Avebury Henge, stopping at some little villages on the way. Both of the henges were really interesting. The people who built the sites had to bring in the stones from long distances, and this was in the times before the wheel was invented. Very little is known about both sites because there were no records kept. At the Avebury Henge, the village of Avebury popped up at some point right in the middle of the stones. And the villagers tore down and chopped up some of the stones, and used them for building materials in the town. In some cases, stone markers have been placed where there are missing stones.


One interesting stone at Avebury is the barber surgeon stone. Apparently, one stone fell down and crushed a guy, whose bones were later found when archaeologists lifted up the stone to place it in its original position. He had barber surgeon tools on him, so the stone was called the barber surgeon stone.  They kept his bones in a museum that was bombed in World War II, and the bones were obliterated.


The bus stopped to look at some other artifacts, such as Silbury Hill, a huge man-made object from prehistoric times, and some of the White Horses, which were carved on the sides of hills. Then the bus went to the villages of Lacock and Castle Combe. Lacock is a village that is mostly owned by Britain's National Trust so it will stay unspoiled and will be immune to gentrification. Many of the residents are tenants of the National Trust, which leaves the rent fairly low. Castle Combe is a traditional Cotswolds village, with spectacular scenery and ancient buildings. It is also where the original Dr. Doolittle movie was filmed in the 60s.



The next day, I took a day trip to Bristol. Bristol is supposed to be a prime city for the English to choose as a vacation spot, but it didn't much do it for me. Maybe after spectacular Bath with its beautiful baths and prominent Roman ruins, a nice English city just wasn't enough for me at that point. But there were some nice sights in Bristol, especially the view from the top of the Cabot Tower, which was built to commemorate John Cabot's exploratory voyage to Canada in the fifteenth century. But getting up to the top of the tower was a chore. It was packed with people, and you could barely squeeze by the people coming down for party of the narrow spiral staircase, and the rest of the staircase (past the first viewing level) only allowed one person to pass in one direction, so if one person was going up and one was going down, someone would have to back up, and if there were others following, they would have to back up too. It was a crowded mess in a tight, difficult space, and I definitely wouldn't recommend it for anyone who is claustrophobic.


I returned to Bath that night, and spent the next morning relaxing at the Thermae Bath Spa, which has access to the waters from the Bath hot spring, and since the Roman Baths site is contaminated, this is a good spot to experience the hot mineral waters. There is a ground level hot pool, and then on a middle floor, there are several steam and sauna rooms of different flavors. There is also a mentholated ice chamber to take in between hot rooms (which somehow is also filled with steam even though it is cold; it feels like cold steam...it's weird). And there is a "relaxation chamber" where you can lie on heated stone chairs shaped to your body, sort of like a chaise lounge. And then, on the roof there is an open hot pool. It was great because it was cold and drizzling, though the pool was very warm, so you could cool of in the cold drizzle. They also had whirlpools, agitated water, and pressurized waterfalls that would massage your back. It was incredibly relaxing and I didn't want to leave, but I had to catch a bus to Cardiff, Wales, so leave I did.


I checked out of the hostel and boarded the bus to Cardiff. It was cold and rainy,  and fir a while was fairly uneventful, until the bus broke down in Newport, Wales. When the bus driver tried to start the bus up after dropping some people off, it sounded like it just died.  He made several attempts, and people started whispering nervously, but he didn't really tell us anything for a while. We were stopped for about a half hour. Then the driver came back and counted all the passengers, and got on the phone telling someone he had to get all these people to their destinations.  So we knew something was up by then; we should have been in Cardiff by then. But shortly after that, another bus came and took those of us who were going to Cardiff. I don't know what happened to the rest of the people, but hopefully they got bailed out shortly thereafter.


I arrived in Cardiff and it was pouring rain. We didn't get dropped off at a station, but just at a bus stop on the street, so I didn't really have a shelter to put the rain fly on my backpack, and decided just to head to the hostel trying to cover my pack with my umbrella, holding it farther back so the pack would be under it. It was about a half hour walk to the hostel, and it rained the while time. I was afraid my stuff would get wet, but it didn't turn out too bad. I was already late, and didn't expect the walk in the rain to the hostel. And I was starving as I hadn't eaten all day. Luckily, the hostel had a decent kitchen, so I got a falafel wrap, which tided me over. By that time, I didn't feel like exploring Cardiff, so I washed some clothes in the sink, hung them to dry, and just relaxed in the room. I think I lost a piece of thermal underwear when I washed it in London and somehow didn't retrieve it after it dried; oh, well, I have all the other clothes I washed. Tomorrow I'll guess I'll check out the city of Cardiff.


I have been walking a huge amount lately. It's the 8th of April today, and since the first, I have walked over 200,000 steps, according to my Samsung Health phone app. And, I entered some challenge thingie through the app to walk 200,000 steps in a month...well, I've already walked that far this month. But I'm not quite that far in the challenge, because I didn't join until the 3rd of April. But I'm at about 180,000 since the 3rd, and should go over 200,000 soon. Yesterday, a walked a little over 35,000 steps, which was the most I have yet done in one day on this journey, but today, I barely cracked 11,000. There are almost a million people participating in this challenge, and I've gone from placing in the high six figures to around 9000th place, but I've dropped back down to about 12000th today because I didn't walk as much. The leaders in the thing are all probably seriously cheating, because I dont think anyone can walk that much, but I don't much care, I'm mostly just doing it for the exercise.