Easter Sunday: a Tri-Country Experience

Hello! Here is the last post from my Easter adventure. We got up early on Sunday and went down to breakfast.  We got the idea that breakfast had the potential for being interesting, but they had cereal and toast and that was all we really needed (was it a let down after the Royal Albion?  Kind of.  But we were just happy to have food).  Then, we wandered around Barry for a little while before getting our train back to Cardiff to start our journey back to Scotland.

This is the town hall and library of Barry.

Here's Barry.  I liked the little buildings.

Here's a building that we found that looked really cool.  I think that it only had offices in it which wasn't nearly as exciting as it could be, but we still enjoyed.

This statue was outside of that building. We decided it was the founder of Barry.

Here's Barry.  It really was a quaint town.

After we got back into Cardiff, we waited for our train to Birmingham.  The adventure to get to Birmingham had the potential to again be very interesting, but it all worked out for us.  Since it was a holiday, they were doing some engineering stuff at some of the stations, so we had to take a train out of Cardiff, take a bus to a different station, then a bus to another station, and finally a train to Birmingham.  It worked out really well though.  I slept most of the way.  I was excited though because we switch buses in Gloucester which is where they have their annual cheese rolling contest each year.  (We've talked about it a lot in my leisure studies class.)  Basically, there's this really big hill and people chase a wheel of cheese down it.  Evidently, people get really hurt doing this every year.  I didn't get to see where it takes place, but I was excited to be there.  (Here's a video of the contest incase you're interested http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOyQBSMeIhM).  

Then, we finally got our train to Birmingham. They funny this is, that we had a stop in Birmingham for an hour and the train we were taking out of Birmingham was the same train to Edinburgh that we were catching in an hour. (In the minds of ScotRail: "Why yes.  It would be much cheaper for these girls to get on a train to Edinburgh.  Get off for an hour and get on the next one."...stupid ScotRail.) We tried to just stay on that train, but the lady basically told us we couldn't do it.  So, we experienced Birmingham for an hour.  We discovered that if we bought something from this bookstore that we got McDonald's coupons, so I bought a sandwich for the train (the ride from Birmingham to Edinburgh was 6 hours) and got my 6 piece McNuggets and a medium fry for 1.99.  It was a good time.

The train ride back to Scotland was actually really nice.  I sat with Grace and we talked and slept for the majority of the time.  The 6 hours went by really fast.  We easily got our train back into Stirling and managed to find a bus back to campus (we were worried that they might not be running at 10:30 on Easter Sunday, but they were).  Overall, we had a great trip.  Now, we're looking forward to planning our Royal Wedding adventure!