The Big Pit
Waking up in our separate Dragon Inn hotel rooms in Crickhowell is less of a silent blessing than we may have hoped. The snoring or showering noises are replaced with the clattering of another downpour and the local traffic. As agreed, we’re in the hotel restaurant at 8:30 for some breakfast. I sample the traditional Welsh breakfast (which includes ’laver bread’ and ‘glamorgan sausage’) and Pim has the traditional British breakfast (with black pudding).
Over breakfast we discuss today’s plans. First up is Big Pit, an old mine that is no longer actively being mined but is still in use and is open to visitors. After that, we’ll head down to Cardiff to see what the capitol of the Principality of Wales has to offer. We thank our friendly Portuguese innkeeper Pedro, check out and are on our way. It’s a short (and cloudy) drive to the mine; within half an hour we’re in Blaenafon parking our car at the Pit. One nice aspect of this particular trip is the cost: entrance to the mine is free of charge.
An old miner, Peter, takes us down in the “cage” (what miners call the lift or elevator) and tells us all about life in the mines. From his own experience (with more modern equipment and better working conditions) and from his ancestors’ experiences. Amazing how poorly workers (children aged 5 and up) were treated (exploited) as little as one hundred years ago!
After our short stint in the mine we come back up to the surface and survey the rest of the Pit. There’s a bunch of canaries at this coalmine, we visit the explosives warehouse (sadly, none were left) and generally scope the area. Time to leave for Cardiff.
Cardiff, too, is pretty close by. Of course, we’re pretty hungry again so we find a place to have some lunch and then walk around the city a bit. There’s another castle, surprisingly called ‘Cardiff Castle’, but entry is 11 pounds and we’ve been pretty much castled out by now. To prevent overdosing on castles, we decide to skip this one and instead visit Bute park next to it. In the end, Cardiff doesn’t really do it for us so we get back into the car and get going again. We cross the bridge over the Severn river and we’re back in England. Within less than 90 minutes, we get to Swindon where we rest our wary legs in another Campanile hotel and spend some time writing blogposts.
Posted by Paul de Weerd at 11:29 AM
The Magic Roundabout
Have you ever heard of the Magic Roundabout in Swindon? I have, as it is often on display at the Google office lobby, where there’s a looping Earth presentation where it takes you to strange places on the globe. Kind of cool - and that’s where I picked up the ‘Swindon Magic Roundabout’. It is a very confusing place, to quote the Source Of All Truth Wikipedia:
In 2005, it was voted the worst roundabout in a survey by a UK insurance company.[4] In September 2007, the Magic Roundabout was named as one of the World’s Worst Junctions by a UK motoring magazine.[5] In December 2007, BBC News reported a survey identifying The Magic Roundabout as one of the “10 Scariest Junctions in the United Kingdom”.[6]However the roundabout provides a better throughput of traffic than other designs and has an excellent safety record, since traffic moves too slowly to do serious damage in the event of a collision.[7]
Well well well then. WE’RE THERE, DUDE!!!!1
So, after dinner tonight (in a somewhat sketchy italian joint called Fratello’s - the food was not bad but just.. not… good… enough), Paul and I decided that it would be absolutely fan-fucking-tastic to crash the Merc on the Magic Roundabout, and I had purposefully avoided drinking any alcohol to make it even more likely that I would freak out on the pavement.
With great deliberation, we turned on the GPS logger for this wonderful journey over the Swindon roads. We also took pictures, made film, and have the dashboard cam files saved [for future uploading to Youtube, I am now typing this on a 3G tethered Android, perhaps not the best use of our data plan :-]. But I will show you this:
Absolute hilarity ensued as we boldly entered with our Swiss plated, right-hand-side driverseat vehicle, because honestly - if the Brits vote this the scary-shit, how could we NOT drive on this beautifully architected street? Proudly, I first gave it a go, entering from the NorthWest, driving all sorts of clockwise and counter-clockwise directions, only slamming the brakes once after finding that I was more than entirely disoriented and generally not knowing what the hell I was doing. Then I drove off to the NorthEastern corner and gave Paul a go. He, too, had fun consistently scanning all around “look left? look right? Damnit, just look in ALL THE DIRECTIONS!” and making his way around the small roundabouts in the big roundabout in a rather roundabout fashion. We giggled like school girls. Oh boy, so much fun we had. Then I dropped Paul off and he decided to commit this act of driving to film. He took out his Android, started filming while I went over the northern loop, and just as I was about to go into the southern loop, a cop car drove past me and ogled me, with a grin on his face of the sorts “don’t screw around here, son”, so I quickly bolted off of the roundaroundaroundaroundaboutaboutabout (what’s all this about?) and we called it a day.
Swindon, we love you. You make roadtrippers happy!!
**Posted by Pim van Pelt at 2:54 PM **
