Caerphilly Cheese Steak

On our journey into Wales, we hit two major castles and crossed into Mexico.

The first stop, about 2 hours drive from home, was Caerphilly Castle -- a monster of a place sitting on 30 acres in the middle of Caerphilly, a modern town outside of Cardiff in south Wales. The place is well-known for its castle and the cheese it gives its name to. The castle is the largest in Wales, the 2nd largest in Britain (only smaller than Windsor), and is an amazing example of 13th century military technology. It was a concentric design with walls inside walls -- to get to the middle you needed to cross three drawbridges and get through 4 massive doors and portcullises.


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From Caerphilly, we set out for Carreg Cennen (kare egg ken in) with a planned pit stop at the Pant-yr-Athro Country Inn and International Hostel. More importantly, the guidebook we had for Wales mentioned they also served up some Mexican food. The place ended up being quite out of our way and also closed and seemingly desolate. It was hard to tell if they were actually still a functioning business. Yet another attempt to find decent Mexican in the UK has failed!


From there, we finished the trek to Carreg Cennen -- a castle in by far the most dramatic location I have seen in Great Britain. Perched atop a high hill in the middle of rural Wales, it is quite a sight to see.

The castle actually sits in the middle of private farm land, surrounded by pastures of roving sheep. The hike up to the castle is a leisurely 30 minutes. The side of the castle opposite the winding hill approach is a limestone precipice that drops sharply down into a quiet brook and then again into more farmland.


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We left about 9AM Saturday morning for our little adventure, and returned back to the Lilacs around 6:30PM that night. We guessed we spent only about 2 and a half hours not driving. The last leg, after Carreg Cennen, was a crazy trip through the tiniest, steepest, narrowest, hedge-encroachedest, farm-vehicle obstructedest roads I had been on here yet. I was glad to get out of the car when we finally made it home!

Here you go, mum: more pictures!



Cheers!






“The Castle Aaahhhgggg - our quest is at an end.” - Month Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail (1975)