Summer Travels: Cardiff

Our first port of call on our Welsh trip was Cardiff. I once went to a short academic conference at the university there but had never visited the city itself, and neither had M or TG. Tenby was quite a long drive so we decided we would spend a night in Cardiff to break the journey and have a look round the city. A long trip meant dealing with the ups and downs of charging the car while away from home. We stopped at a motorway service station on the M4 a bit before Cardiff only to find we were third in a queue of cars waiting to use a single charger. By the time we had bought and eaten pasties of lunch we were second but another car was also waiting. We all had a grumble about the inadequacies of the motorway charging network, then as we still had plenty of juice in our battery and the next car was down to 10% we left them to it and went on to Cardiff where the Zap Map app directed us to some on street chargers near the main shopping street. These turned out to be brand new, worked like a dream, and included free parking, so we had a wander around the shops while the car was doing its thing.  

With the battery looking healthier, we drove down to Cardiff Bay, which has been redeveloped from old docks into a vibrant waterfront area. I assumed it was sea, but Google tells me it is a large freshwater lake at the mouth of a river estuary. After fuelling ourselves on some gazillion calorie traybake slices from a cafe we did a circular walk around the Bay. 

We walked past the Welsh Senedd (parliament) building and this pretty Norwegian Church which is now an arts centre and coffee shop. Unfortunately it was closing just as we got there so we didn't get a chance to look round.  

There was lots of street art including a series of sculptures representing the people of Cardiff, likely this miner leaning against a cart. 

We ended up at the Wales Millennium Centre, where a couple of entertainers in inflatable dinosaur suits were entertaining children in front of the entrance. I didn't manage to photograph it very well, but the curved wall carved in both Welsh and English was very impressive. To the right in the picture above in Roald Dahl Plass (Dahl was born in the city) was a small fairground leading down to a large Ferris wheel at the edge of the water. 

After our stroll it was time for dinner in a waterfront pub before heading off to a Premier Inn on the northern edge of the city for the night. In the morning there was torrential rain, so we waited for it to ease a bit before setting off for Tenby. By the time we arrived it had stopped raining, and unbelievably (Wales is not renowned for being dry!) that was the last rain we saw all week.