Wales- Cardiff

Cardiff… in one word, Fantastic! As the doctor would say. We spent the last week in and around Cardiff and for two Whovians such as ourselves, this was absolute bliss. But not only for the Doctor who sights around every corner was Cardiff a Fantastic place to visit, but the entire city was quite fun to be in. After our time in London Cardiff was exactly what we needed. Whilst London is busy busy with people everywhere and a feeling like you always have to be somewhere and doing something, Cardiff was uber relaxed, and the people were all very friendly and they seem to have more pubs per square inch than London.

We spent our first day down at Cardiff Bay, the location of the Torchwood Base (under Roald Dahl Place) and then visited the Doctor who experience. I have never seen Bec so excited ever she was trying to contain it and be cool but it seeped out in mini explosions of OMG I’m so excited right now and did some little jumps of joy. At our time inside the Doctor who experience we got to see all the creations over the years and how they made some of the aliens come to life through robotics. And then to top it off at the end a shop with all the doctor who stuff you could ever want. We may have gone mad.

The rest of the day we spent walking around seeing the bay, we came across Ianto’s memorial/shrine and spent time reading peoples messages to him. I should mention that Ianto is a character from the show Torchwood that they killed off and too many people (including us) did not want that to happen. And really he was such an awesome character they should never have done it. 

We spent some time wandering around Cardiff castle which is a beautiful medieval castle right in the centre of town. It was owned by a very wealthy family who played a large role in the building of Cardiff and was donated to the city of Cardiff by them in the last few Decades. Nic mostly loved this as the outer walls have been half converted to an air raid shelter during WW2 which we could wander through.  For the charge of the ticket we could also go through several of the internal rooms, and walk through the grounds and up to the top of the keep for some great views of Cardiff.

We went for a walk through the Bute gardens with hot chocolates which Nic managed to severely burn her tongue.  This is still quite damaged and painful 3 days later, go her there, getting up to her usual tricks.

We had a day trip out to Caerphilly Castle and spent a lovely day there wandering around the ruins of a castle which is the largest in Whales and apparently one of the most impressive castles of Europe. It was defiantly huge! And has a very cool leaning tower (leaning at a greater angle than the tower in Pisa) which has been leaning for approximately 300 years after possibly being damaged in an attempted siege and remains unsupported.

We had a lovely stay at a house with people who were really chilled and had an awesome cat named Enid who loved to be around people for pats and hugs and also loved to climb everything including bathroom doors.

Food wise we are very over potato. Everything comes with chips including breakfast meals (bacon and eggs with a helping of chips on top, we also went and got a jacket potato for lunch the other day and got asked if we wanted chips with it) . I finally got to try some black pudding tasted just like salami not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Bec is still obsessed with deep fried Halloumi. She is looking forward to some good curry as there 3 hot spicy rating Nic can even eat.

Beer wise we tried the Carling beer quite tasty and drank much of this. We also tried the many different types of Brains beer Bec liked it but it could have been colder.

To end our Cardiff experience we found out that you haven’t seen the real Wales until you have seen an old granny huk a luggie on the side of the street, thankfully we crossed this off our bucket list on the last day of our stay!