From Sunburns in Brighton to Karaoke in Wales

Hello! First, let me say, I'm sorry this post is going to be so long.  There were lots of pictures that I wanted to include in this. Our Saturday began bright and early.  We were on the streets of Brighton walking back to the Royal Albion by 7:30.  (By the way, the lady at reception at the Jurys Inn, was horrified to discover that the Royal Albion turned us away at 1:30 in the morning.  The fact that she found that unacceptable was pretty satisfying.) When we got to the hotel, we were happy to see that the man from last night wasn't present.  The lady at reception was actually really nice.  She compensated us and apologized for what happened.  She also gave us the business card of the manager at the hotel and told us to call or e-mail him if we wanted to complain or if we would like to come back they would give us a room for a reduced rate.  She was really nice.  Also, she got the hint pretty quickly that we weren't leaving without our included full English breakfast.  (All I had to say was "The price of the room included breakfast." and she jumped in with "it's right through those doors.").  Breakfast was great! It had real food.  Which sounds really stupid but they had sausage, bacon, eggs, croissants, cereal and everything.  

After breakfast, we walked down to look at the pier before it opened and decided we would head back there later. 

Here is Brighton Pier.  It was pretty early still, so nobody was there yet.

Then, we walked over to the Royal Pavilion in Brighton.  On the way we saw this fountain that was cool with all of the flowers blooming around it.

It was really pretty.

The Royal Pavilion consists of a big building with lots of gardens around it.  It used to be the home of King George IV.  It was eventually bought by Brighton when Queen Victoria decided she didn't like the lack of privacy.  It was really pretty.

Here is the entrance gate and some of the gardens.

Here is the Pavilion itself.  We read a plaque that said it was built by someone in India which is why the style is so different from everything else you see in Brighton.

After the Royal Pavilion, we headed back to the Pier.  We had a good time walking around and seeing all the rides and everything. There were also really nice views of Brighton.

Here's Brighton.

They also had some awesomely tacky things like this for the Royal Wedding.  We all agreed that this isn't Prince William's best picture and it's unfortunate that it was everywhere. 

We also went down to the beach.  The shore was kind of strange.  The upper part of the beach was rocky, but it was sandy down in the water.  This didn't seem strange to anyone other than us though.  People were walking on the rocks like it was no big deal.

I got to stand in the ocean, which was awesome.

After our feet were sufficiently cooled off (it was really warm in Brighton.  I think it was about 75 that day). We decided that the cotton candy (or candy floss as they call it here) was something we needed to try.

We're pretty sure that the lady gave us bigger sizes than we ordered.

We spent a while just walking on the pier and people watching.  As the day went on, more and more people kept appearing in Brighton.  We think this was where everybody in England goes for Easter.  By noon, there were tons of people everywhere.  There were also lots of police which I guess was to keep the crowd under control.  They had funny hats.

Here's CSI: Brighton.

I wasn't kidding when I said there were a lot of people.  This is just one part of the beach.

Eventually we started to head back to the train station for our 2:00 train to Cardiff.  By this point there were hoards of people streaming down the streets from the train station.  We were pretty happy to get away from the crowds even though we really liked Brighton.  We also found a Krispy Kreme where we bought donuts for our train ride.

Saturday was an easy travel day for us.  We only had to change trains once to get from Brighton to Cardiff and it was an easy connection to make.  My only problem with the 3 hour train ride to Cardiff, was that my seat was in direct sunlight, so I now have a lovely sunburn on half of my face and chest that's really uneven.  But, other than that, it was a nice train ride.  We got into Cardiff at about 6:30.  I'll be honest.  I had built Cardiff up in my mind as being a cute city.  It was a lot bigger than I imagined (and a lot drunker for it only being 6:30 when we got there).  But it definitely had some great sights.  Anyways, this is how Cardiff greeted us.  We got off the train and were walking down the street behind some big guys with neon yellow bands on their arms that said "security", when we see a group of men start punching each other.  Then, the security guys ran and pulled them apart.    

Have no fear, I captured part of the action.

It was pretty intense.  After seeing this, we just kind of walked around until we found a nice park to have our dinner in.  We saw lots of sights along the way.

We liked all of the flags lined up on the streets.  We thought it looked cute.

Here is Cardiff Castle.  

Here is a bell tower that was by Cardiff Castle. 

Eventually, we found a huge park where we could sit by the river and eat dinner.  Afterwards, we wandered around the park before heading back to the train station.  Here are some of the sights we saw on our walk.

This is the area where we ate dinner.  It was really pretty.

This is the castle from the park.

We also found the town hall.

And a really pretty church.

Once we got back to the train station, we hopped on our train to Barry where we had a hotel for the night.  We were kind of wondering if good old Barry would be a sketchy town, but it actually turned out to be nice.  We wandered for a while trying to figure out the map that Katelin printed out (Google printed all of the street names in Welsh) but eventually went into a little restaurant and got directions.  The lady was really helpful.  When we told her where we were looking for, she was like "ah the Tadross hotel".  We figured this was good sign.

We found the hotel easily after that.  It was a family business type of hotel.  The man at reception was a lot nicer than the Royal Albion guy and actually had a room for us.  The hotel had a pub connected to it the reception man owned too and within 5 minutes of entering the hotel we were told that it was in fact karaoke night and were handed a karaoke "menu".  So, we got to our room (which was really nice.  It was defined as being a "family room" for 3 adults and 1 child.  So, it was spacious and we each had our own bed). After getting settled in our room, we decided to check out karaoke.  It turned out to be a lot of fun.  We sang such classics as Enrique Iglesias's Hero and Celine Dion's My Heart Will go On.  We also enjoyed listen to everyone else sing.  The receptionist guy sang some Barry Manilow and the guy that was in charge of karaoke kept playing American songs during the breaks that we knew.  We had a great time.  

Evidently Karaoke is something that happens every Saturday at the Tadross Hotel.  We had a great time ringing in our Easter with some good old fashioned karaoke. We also figured that the girl at the restaurant where we got directions has probably been to karaoke here a few times before.

After we had our fill of karaoke, we went back to our room and went to bed early.  It was nice to have a comfy bed and earlier evening after the day before.  The only issue we had was that the toilet made really strange paper shredding noises (it said something on it about have a shredder inside).  It was kind of suspect, but other than that it was great night.