Day 6 Cardiff, Wales

Day 6

Oct 20/09

This morning we went out and explored the stone circle. The stone circle here surrounds the village and you can walk right up the stones and touch them. It was a bit of a drizzly day, but that didn't stop us from taking a hour or so walk around the stones. It was really quite fascinating. They were placed essentially in farmer's fields with sheep grazing around them. I guess the stones weren't placed in farmers fields, more like the farmer's fields surround the stones. Well we walked around, enjoyed the sheep fields and stones and headed out to Bath. At Bath we walked around and saw the beautiful Roman style buildings. This was the place the Romans lived a few centuries ago. They also had this giant map on the ground where for just a moment I standing in Edmonton. We then saw the Roman baths from the outside and headed back to the car to continue driving to Cardiff, a city in Wales. We drove off and then remembered that we probably should have looked for a money exchange a little more seriously, but I figured we'd be able to find one in Cardiff. Not long after that thought we made it upon our first and only toll booth of the trip. We ended up having to pay for most of it in Canadian dollars. Crappy thing was, they would only accept foreign dollars in denominations of $10. Since $10 is about 5 pounds and the toll was 5.40 it meant if we had paid it in Canadian dollars, the toll would have cost us $20! Luckily we had 40p and were able to pay the $10 and then 40p (in British pence). Man oh man. But we had made it across to another country. We were now in Wales. You could tell we were in a different country, but it's hard to put it in words why. There were still fields of sheep and green rolling hills with lots of colorful trees, but it was different. Mind you the signs helped since they were written in both English and Welsh. When we got to Cardiff, there wasn't too much to see. We could have gone into the Castle, but right now we have to be smart with money and we knew we'd be seeing Edinburgh Castle shortly. When circumstances are unknown, it's best to err on the side of caution. We walked around a bit and of course as I usually need to do it, I had McDonald's in Wales. My Big Mac tasted drier than in Edmonton, but still same old Big Mac. So we walked around a bit more and took pictures and then it was back to the car to decide where to next. We decided that we would spend the night in the Black Mountain National Park. We drove over and found a cozy spot near a lake, Trevor cooked up some pasta and we went to bed.