16May2009: Day 355: Cardiff Castle, Wales

We are now in Wales. It’s our last trip away to end our year long trip over here in England. It took us about 3.5 hours to get here. We got to our hotel and headed to Cardiff Castle. We got a combination ticket of three castles of which one is Cardiff. We were able to get a tour and luckily, we were able to take pictures. There was sign saying no picture taking but the tour guide said we could as long as we didn’t use flash. I was really glad as these rooms were really neat to look at.

Cardiff is one of three castles owned by the Bute family. These people were considered the wealthiest family in the world at the time (1700’s-1800’s). The castle was originally Roman built and was more of a fort. When the 3rd Marquess of Bute decided to build a new tower in 1888, they found the Roman ruins and he scrapped his plans and dug out the ruins instead and built from there.

He then brought in an architect by the name of William Burgess who really made a lot of improvements inside the castle to make it a livable mansion. Burgess really had some very interesting designs and painted directly onto the walls. The pictures of the inside designs that you see here are from Burgess.

We got out of the tour and had about an hour before the place closed. We went to the keep which was just a shell. It was getting extremely windy and ominous looking so Chris took Makenna back to the main grounds and I went up higher in the keep. It became very eerie as the wind was blowing really hard and the sky was getting dark. It was like the walls were howling. I was really afraid at one point that the walls were going to collapse it was so windy.

We left and found a Pizza Hut to eat dinner at and got Makenna some chicken strips but she only ate one and wasn’t really hungry for any more. We left there and walked around in downtown Cardiff a bit. We found the Cardiff City Hall and a museum (which was closed), then headed back to the hotel.

Makenna was fairly well behaved for the most part in the castle. She had a moment or two but we got over them quickly. This was surprising as she had a short nap in the car on the way to Cardiff and we didn’t have the cart in the castle. We just had to make sure she wasn’t touching things that she shouldn’t as the paintings on the walls were really old and delicate.

Hopefully tomorrow she’ll be just as good. It’s a Sunday though and considering her track record on Sundays while we’ve been on different outings, they haven’t been too good. I guess we’ll see what tomorrow brings.