Worldcon Trip Day 41: By Rail from Camarthen to Swansea

I once again will not be able to post photos of today's trip because it takes so long for the pictures and video to upload from my phone to Flickr.

Monday was a holiday (US Labor Day) for me, but it of course is not a holiday in the UK. Today's excursion was a train trip from Carmarthen to Swansea, on a Transport for Wales Class 197 2-car DMU. These are reasonably comfortable trains, and I sat back and enjoyed the trip down the Towy estuary and along the Welsh coast, crossing the River Loughor and into Swansea.

From the station, we walked to the Swansea Indoor Market, where I had a serving of cockles, which I had never had before. It was interesting, and they were good with pepper and vinegar.

We walked down to the waterfront and visited the National Waterfront Museum and would have visited the Swansea Tram Museum, but the latter is closed on Monday. I did learn about the Swansea and Mumbles Railway, the world's first passenger horsecar railway service.

After a nice lunch at Gigi Gao's Favorite Chinese Restaurant along the waterfront, we decided to (sort of) recreate the trip that the Swansea and Mumbles line once covered by taking a bus up to Mumbles. There we walked up to Oystermouth Castle, but we did not have time to actually go into the castle before we needed to start working our way back for the return bus.

We made it back to Swansea station with time to spare and the ride back to Carmarthen gave us the contrasting view of the sea at high tide, as it had been at low tide when we came the other way and while we rode the bus.

This may sound like we did not do anything, but we walked around and I got to see a whole lot of things. Everything is new to me here, and I enjoyed myself. I don't have to spend the whole day trying to check off lots of museums or tourist attractions to have a good time.

Photos to come when they are online.

Worldcon Trip Day 41 Part 2: Swansea: Trains, Cockles, Trams, and Castles

Now that the photos have uploaded, I can show the photos from Monday's trip to Swansea in this backdated entry.

( A Day Out in Swansea by Rail )

We headed back to the barn ourselves, threading our way through a heavy downpour after having had what I would consider pretty good weather (mostly overcast with some mist at times, but neither too hot nor too cold). I'd say we got lucky overall, as we never got caught out in the open.

As I said in my earlier post, we did not engage in rushing from point to point trying to check off everything possible. We looked at stuff and I did log more that 11,000 steps, but I was not trying to win any prizes. I got a bit of footage that may appear in a future RLMS and otherwise enjoyed myself without exhausting myself.