Day 10 - UK

4 April 2011

To say I slept fitfully and very lightly is not an exaggeration and I made Aaron get up and move the van at 6:30 the next morning. He wasn’t happy but I just couldn’t handle some farmer balling us out for parking in his driveway.

Maybe 400 metres down the road we found another pull in big enough for us to park, have breakfast, do the dishes and leave. The land next to us was both pasture and bush land and also the locals ‘free’ dumping ground. There was rubbish everywhere, including what looked like a split bag of excrement. Dog or human it was hard to tell and quite frankly I didn’t want to know. I felt terrible for the farmer who would be able do nothing about it except continually clean up his back yard and pay to have other peoples shite taken away.

As well as the rubbish Aaron noticed a torn wallet hanging in a gorse bush, below it a couple of membership cards and an old photo. Due to lack of water damage it had clearly been dumped in the last 24 hours and it was obvious from the old photo of women in RAF(?) uniforms and a membership card for a Lace society that it belonged to an older lady. I was disgusted. The photo obviously meant a lot to be in the woman’s wallet and it was unlikely to be replaceable. I picked them up and put them in my bag for when we found a policeman or police station.

We drove into Caerphilly and almost immediately found a McDonalds with WiFi. For 30 minutes I tried to connect to the Internet to send this email but the laptop kept crashing. In the end I got so frustrated we both decided to leave. From there we drove to Caerphilly castle, in the heart of the city.

By now we had a completely different impression of Wales than when we had when we’d arrived.

The cities are quite scary places. It is here you realise that the Welsh economy is very depressed. You can see it in people’s faces, in the graffiti, the litter, the grime, the posters about boy racers killing mates, about socially unacceptable behaviour, about crime, etc. You can see it when you notice just how many young mums there are, when you see that every McDonald’s or fast food chain has a full car park.

Perhaps it didn’t help that it was a bitterly cold, wet and windy day.

Caerphilly Castle was very cool. It’s an old castle that was privately owned in the early 1900s. It was in a ruinous state then but the owner being extremely wealthy decided he would have most of it rebuilt to make it look like it once would have done. He spent millions doing it, including redoing the moat. Now it’s a great tourist attraction plus also can be hired out for weddings. Cool!

We didn’t spot any policeman in Caerphilly so we drove to our next destination Castle Coch. The GPS got us there but didn’t.

“You are here” it said in the middle of a roundabout.

“What the??” So we followed the signs leading to the castle, we got off the roundabout, went down the highway, turned on the roundabout, got back on the highway on the other side, got to the roundabout, turned right and ended up in the same spot the GPS got us to.

“What the??!”

We could see the castle way up on the hill but with seemingly no way of getting to it.

“They can get fucked” said Aaron and we took if in search of our next destination.

Although that reaction may seem overkill, one thing we noticed as soon as we got to Wales is lack of signage. Several times already we had seen a sign that said to go in a certain direction to find a certain something and then that’s the last sign we’d see.

Sometimes signage, like for campgrounds, is nowhere to be seen except at the entrance to the property itself. Kind of difficult to notice when you’re driving at speed a long highways.

We carried on driving until we got to Cosmeston Medieval Village in Penarth. Again it was poorly signposted but eventually we found it. We parked in the large carpark and had lunch.

“Hey, it’s a police car”

“What?”

Unbelievably a police car pulled in and parked maybe 20 metres away. I gave the driver the wallet and explained I’d found it in Caerphilly. While the wallet’s been wrecked, with any luck the poor dear will get her photo back.

For once it was free parking. Woohoo!

After lunch we wandered over to what we assumed was the entrance to the village. There was a café attached and signage and information about the place being a wetlands park but nothing about the village. The only thing I saw that gave the game away were a couple of postcards with pictures of people in medieval dress.

“Is this where we buy tickets for the medieval village”

“Yes”

Weird. Just weird. Why do they go for minimal advertising in this country? It’s like they want you to go to these places but they don’t really.

 After a short wander through the park along a boardwalk we came across a gate to one side. Still no signage. The only reason we knew to go in was because the lady selling the ticket told us to go in when we saw the white building.

We walked in and went to the white building. Still no signage anywhere and everything was locked. Was there more than 1 white building? Had we inadvertently passed another white building along the way?

And then we noticed some people gardening and went over and asked them if we were in the right place. It turns out we were but we must have been the first visitors for the day as they hadn’t bothered to unlock anything and the woman who sold us the tickets forgot to radio through to say people were arriving.

Quick as a flash one of them opened up, raced inside, handed us a map, some audio equipment, briefly explained some stuff and left us to it.

Unfortunately we had arrived off season as in summer it’s a fully working village with people in period costume, a bit like Motat used to be I guess.

Having said that, we were there over an hour and it was a good tour and worth going to. They also had 3 pigs there so we got in some good piggy scratches.

Cosmeston was our last tour of the day and then we drove towards Kidwelly, our first stop of the next day.

The idea was again to find a free night’s parking. Again we were running out of light before we finally came across a nice looking picnic area in Pen-y-Mynydd.

It wasn’t until we parked that we noticed the entrance had a gate with a padlock. Unfortunately there we no signage. Was someone going to come along, kick us out and lock the gate? We decided we had no choice but to chance it.

In the end no one did come along but the odd person pulled in to give their dogs a run. I’m finding it an interesting observation about the types of dogs we see in the areas we are in. The nicest, safest seeming places the dogs are all collies, labradors and whippets. As we find ourselves in lower socio economic areas the dogs all seem to have some kind of bull terrier in them.

The dogs being run in this park were all bull terrier types. I made a mental note and decided it would be a light sleep again.

All was well until 12 O’clock and a car pulled in. I was instantly awake. It was a horrid night with the wind and the rain and it seemed an odd thing for a car to just turn up on a night like this. I shook Aaron awake.

And so we sat and listened. The car doors opened and shut and we could hear the voices of young males. I looked out the van window and saw them with torches walking over to the pergola type structure in the park and there they flashed their torches around, smoked about 3 cigarettes each and talked loudly, although the wind whipped away the words before I could hear them.

After about 30 minutes Aaron got himself into the driver’s seat ready to leave if we had to.

Not long after that the 3 males got back in their car. And there they sat, until well after 1am before eventually starting up the car and driving off. It was quite a nerve-wracking long hour!