Travel 2009

Some Britons I’ve spoken to claim to be unaware that their country has a National Space Centre. Well, it does and it’s in Leicester. I know this because Chris Williams took me there.
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Another day, another castle. But first …
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This is Conwy from the vantage point of its town walls, on a drizzly morning in early autumn. It has a population of 14000, which doesn’t really qualify it as small, but the area inside the walls is quite compact, so it feels much smaller than it should.
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After Cardiff, my next base of operations was to be Conwy (above), a small town on the north coast of Wales. But getting from south Wales to north Wales by rail is surprisingly difficult: there’s no mainline route which doesn’t spend most of its time in England, and I wanted to see some of the Welsh countryside rolling past my window! Luckily, Chris suggested a workable alternative: take a main line train to Porthmadog, take a tourist steam train from there to Blaenau Ffestiniog, and from there another mainline train to Conwy (or rather Llandudno Junction, which is walking distance from Conwy). This would take all day, but since I probably would done one of the tourist trains anyway, I didn’t lose much in the way of holidaying time. And the rail trip was worth it!
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After my day of fortifications I felt it was time for a change of pace, so I headed east for Swansea. The main attraction here (other than the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, of course) is the National Waterfront Museum, which explores the industrial history and technological of Wales. Of which there is quite a lot!
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Cardiff Castle was just the first of many Welsh fortresses I visited. In fact, the next day I was at two more: Caerleon, a Roman legionary headquarters, and Caerphilly Castle, the second-largest castle in Britain.
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All of a sudden, my time in Cornwall was over. But it was hard to feel too sad, because my next stop was Cardiff, capital of Wales (and, incidentally, scareship central). Cardiff is perhaps not as pretty as the places I’d seen in Cornwall, but it has plenty of culture which kept me occupied. And one big castle!
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After my little misadventure at Camelford, I started the next day out of position, and had a long way to go just to get back to my real hotel in Truro for a change of clothes. So for my day’s excursion I didn’t want to go too far from Truro, and luckily Falmouth is only a short trip by train.
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After the Exeter conference my holiday proper began. I travelled by train down to Cornwall, to Truro where I made my base for the next few days. Truro is the county seat, though it’s not a big town by any means. (Nowhere in Cornwall is, which is part of its charm.) It does have the Royal Cornwall Museum, which I looked through on my first morning there. Among the Roman coins and old coaches is the so-called Arthur stone, which was found at Tintagel Castle — which is where I went in the afternoon.
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