There are so many beautiful places in the UK. We usually try to have weekend breaks across the UK during the summers, especially when it’s sunny. Wales is one of our favourite places to go back every now and again. Wales countrysides are highly recommended to visit because they not as busy as England’s ones. We planned a weekend trip to Wales, it was a spontaneous trip and we didn’t put anything on our schedule. Our main focus was exploring new parts of Wales.
Renting a car in London
We don’t own a car, because we don’t really need it in London (I will explain why in a different post). We travelled to Wales once before without a car, by public transport. We had fun, but our visit ended up being quite limited by the fact that we could not freely move around. We learned our lesson and promised ourselves to have a car on our next visit to Wales. We usually choose Heathrow Airport as our pick-up location simply because they are open 24-hours. We picked up the car on Friday evening and went back home to take some rest as we planned to have an early start on Saturday morning.
Driving from London to Cardiff
We started our road trip at 6:30 am from London. It is good to get up earlier as the roads won’t be as busy and you can also save some time and get to your destination early. We were thinking we could either have breakfast on the motorway or stop in one of the cities on our way. We could have stopped in Bath but we decided to eat our breakfast in Wales, so we drove directly to Cardiff. It took us around 3 hours to drive from our place to the Cardiff’s city centre.
Breakfast in Cardiff
Since we had been in Cardiff before we already knew the best place where to find some good food. We drove directly to the Cardiff Bay and arrived there around 9:30. We were awake and hungry, but the city felt as it was still asleep. Because of this, finding a parking spot was really easy and hassle-free.
Welsh Breakfast vs English Breakfast
We found a cool place to have breakfast, which had both English Breakfast and Welsh Breakfast on the menu! We are familiar with the English Breakfast, but we didn’t really hear about the Welsh Breakfast. A full Welsh Breakfast includes bacon, sausage, eggs, black pudding, cockles, laverbread (laverbread is known as ‘bara law’ and it is a traditional Welsh delicacy), and toasts.
I am going, to be honest with you, neither I nor Bruno went for these options. I went for a vegetarian breakfast and he ordered an Eggs Royale.
Driving From Cardiff to the West of Wales
Once we got back to the car, we opened Google Maps and just selected a random location in the west of Wales. We drove towards the west coast without really knowing what to expect. We just wanted to get to the west side of the UK’s land. It is kind of adventurous not knowing where you will end up. Isn’t it?
The roads were getting smaller and narrower. We went through some crazy but beautiful roads. We really enjoyed driving there, the only issue we had was there wasn’t really enough space for two cars on most of the roads. We had to stop or even reverse sometimes to allow the incoming cars to get through. We were somewhere in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, in case you would like to experience it first hand. Finally, we found a car park next to a small beach. We took a small path up on a hill next to the beach and hiked for a little while. The scenery was breathtaking, we could see people swimming and birds flying, everything was beautiful.
Sleeping in St Davids
We left the beach and checked the map again to find a place for the night. We found St Davids as one of the nearest locations having a few hotels and guesthouses. We decided to try our luck and go there to try and find a room.
We arrived at St Davids, the UK's smallest city. Our plan was to ask the hotels to see whether we could book a room for the night. The first guest house we stopped at gave us the key of a room and let us check it out before deciding whether we wanted to stay there or not. We had a look at it, it was a small room with a beautiful view, we liked it and decided to get it. The room price, including breakfast, was £70.
Once reassured we had accommodation for the night, we went out to find a place to eat (keep in mind we only had breakfast and nothing else). The restaurant we went to had a “Reserved” sign on almost all of its tables. We were there at around 6 pm, so we asked if we could have one of the tables for a quick meal. We were given a table which was reserved for 7 pm, we only had an hour to order and finish our food, but it was more than enough for how hungry we were at that time.
After dinner (or lunch, whatever you want to call it), we walked around St David’s Cathedral. The cathedral is huge and really impressive. Unfortunately, going inside was not an option as we arrived quite late, but we still enjoyed strolling around the open area.
Blue Lagoon in Wales
On the next morning, we checked out from the guest house right after breakfast and headed to the Blue Lagoon. We found about a blue lagoon in Wales by, again, searching on Google Maps. We didn’t really spend much time researching about it, the name sounded appealing so we decided to go and have a look.
At the Blue Lagoon, we could go surfing, kayaking or swimming. We decided to go hiking instead and reached the place where we could watch some people cliff jumping. We didn’t spend a lot of time there because we had to get back to London before 8 pm to drop our rental car.
Brecon Beacons National Park
On the way back, we bought some food from a supermarket and stopped in the Brecon Beacons National Park. We randomly chose a route and went for a very short hike before heading back to London.
We experienced a bit of traffic jam on our way back, but we made it right on time.
We had been to the national park before where we had a chance to visit two beautiful waterfalls, you can read about the trip here: “Traveling to Wales for Waterfalls”.