Au Revoir!

     Wow. That went quickly... here we are in our very conveniently located hotel at Heathrow airport, all ready to catch our flight back home tomorrow morning. The train ride here from Cardiff was really easy, although it took a little while due to some delays. But we're all settled in, and are planning on going out to dinner and spending a nice relaxing evening before traveling tomorrow.

    This trip has really been a dream. It was so nice to be able to slow down and take things day to day, without any deadlines or requirements hanging over our heads. I really appreciate the help that family has given us on the trip, hosting us and helping us plan and execute our adventures. Now, I'm looking forward to heading home and to get started prepping for my next adventure in St Louis. I feel pretty ready.

Some words from Michael:
   Today definitely comes with mixed feelings for me, this trip has been so amazing and has gone much better than I could ever have imagined. It also has made me less worried about my time in Cambridge, as I think I have a feel now for how to navigate over here to some degree. I owe so many thanks to both Valerie's family and my own, who without their support none of this would have been possible (or at the very least, the trip would have looked nothing like it did!).

So yeah. I hope that you've enjoyed the blog. I've had a lot of fun keeping it, as it gave me a nice way to collect my thoughts after each adventure, and now all my pictures are nicely organized.

Cheers!
      Valerie and Michael

Showers in Bath

Heading in!

I suppose that it's fitting to get wet when going to a bathhouse...
    So yeah, this morning we took the train to Bath, England, to explore the roman ruins and see the town. It's a really lovely town... there just is not very much cover for when it starts pouring rain. So our exploring got cut a bit short, and we got a bit wet.
   But the Roman Baths are really cool. They're really well preserved considering their age, and that the baths are in the absolute center of town. The museum is well set-up, too. They've build over the old baths, so you're guided along over the drainage channels, around the alter blocks and old columns, and past carved statues and found artifacts. The springs formed the center of a temple to Minerva (Athena), and were a place to communicate with the goddess and find physical and spiritual healing. There is a lot of anthropological history, too... people used to carve wishes into thin rolls of lead and throw them into the spring to ask Minerva to grant what they wanted. Apparently, most of the wishes were curses... apparently the Romans were friendly people. It was also really cool to see how advanced the romans were in terms of their architecture and engineering. They built a pretty impressive system to move the hot spring water around the baths and the temple, so the baths always had fresh water. And most of those systems are still working. So it was really impressive to walk around in buildings that people have been visiting for thousands of years.

   Today was also our last day in Cardiff; we're heading back to London tomorrow in order to catch our flight back home on Tuesday. It's be absolutely fantastic here. It's been fun hanging out with Scotty, exploring castles, seeing the Olympics... It's been quite the memorable trip!

Looking down on the spring. It used to be enclosed and was the heart of the temple.

These hot springs are the only hydrothermal springs in Britain.

Stone carvings from the original temple front. The ruins are amazingly preserved.

While we tend to think of Roman architecture as plain white marble, that's just because the paint covering everything has worn away. But we saw some very colorful floor mosaics, which were really neat!

I think we're in front of some cool ruins? Probably, because there were lots of cool ruins.

oof. wet.

Looking at the ruins...

We're in front of the main drain, but the flash was tricky...

The main drain from the baths. It's quite the testament to roman engineering!

The main pool.

It would have been so nice to soak in the pools... the steam was rising very invitingly, except for the algae that turns the pools green. Apparently the pools used to covered, so the water would have been clear because nothing would have been growing.

These tiles supported the floor and allowed warm air to circulate underneath, heating the room and turning it into a sauna.

Watching Some Football

     Today was pretty awesome. While walking around Cardiff to find lunch, we stumbled upon a bunch of people playing music and swing dancing in the town square. It's been a while since we've had a chance to dance, so Michael and I were happy to join in. It was a lot of fun!
   In fact, all of Cardiff today felt something like a big fair... there were lots of street performances and vendors and a ton of people everywhere. And that was to be expected, since Team GB was playing tonight!
  Yup yup, we got to see Great Britain play South Korea in the Men's soccer quarterfinals tonight. It was lots of fun to root on Team GB in a nearly full stadium (there were 70,000ish spectators there!). Unfortunately, Great Britain's play left something to be desired, and South Korea definitely was the stronger team throughout the match. Even so (spoiler alert, if the game's been delayed in the States!), it came down to penalty kicks after being tied up since the first half at 1-1. And Great Britain choked on the last kick, so Korea got the win they probably deserved. So the game was quite exciting, and we all had a really fantastic time, and it was totally worth it. I miss soccer (I played for 11ish years) so I always enjoy watching really talented players, which was definitely the case tonight.

We had more face paint in the right colors...

Gearing up to root on Team GB

Our seats were fantastic!! S. Korea kept the ball down on our side the first half, but then GB picked up a bit the second half so we still got a good bit of action down near us.

Scotty's other arm reads "4 GB"

Lined up for the National Anthems

Kickoff!

A close one for GB, but they managed to clear it.

The half time score

Go on, GB! Put it away, already! Unfortunately, they didn't.. :/

Enthusiastic fans

Going into overtime

And going into penalty kicks... I always feel for the keepers, but I guess there's more pressure on the kickers.

The stadium was only a few thousand short of capacity! Brits really came out to support their team!

"Pisa's got nothing on us!"

Caerphilly Castle

 This morning, we woke up without much of anything planned and flipped through the "This is Cardiff" tourism book thing the hotel conveniently provides in each room. When we saw a page with "Pisa's got nothing on us", it naturally caught our attention (since Michael has been complaining that Cardiff beats Pisa hands down as a good place to work for a summer). It turns out that not too far from here is the second largest castle in Wales, Castle Caerphilly, and this castle has a leaning tower, too. So we decided to go.
     It was really really neat. The castle -- fortress, really -- was built in the 13th century, and is your classic knights in shining armor and fair maidens sort of thing. There is a HUGE moat/lake system, designed to keep the castle out of the firing range of attacking armies, giant towers, thick walls... it's amazing. The castle had mostly fallen into ruins by the 16th century, but after WWI, the local aristocracy took archeological interest in the site and it's since been extensively restored. But it's neat, because it's not completely rebuilt, so you can still see how thick the walls were where half a tower is missing, and climb on some rubble that used to be a wall, and see staircases that obviously used to lead somewhere, but that somewhere is now missing.
   So that was a wonderful adventure! This evening we're going with Scotty to "Pub Friday" with his workmates, so that should be an adventure of a different sort... (:

Michael and the geese

There were so many birds! We had to walk through those...

Our lunch spot (:

Sorry Michael... it's not nice to take pictures while people are eating

The castle is a little bit awesome

This tower leans about 11 degrees... the leaning tower of Pisa leans about 3 degrees.

These soldiers have been defending the castle for a really long time...

Quite a big wall!

It's an impressive door

The ruined parts of the castle look really cool!

The walls are huge!

The middle defenses... there were three lines of defense in total, including a large moat/lake, an outer wall, a middle open area (where attackers would have no cover if they made it that far) and huge inner walls.

The inner walls dwarf people!

On the battlements

This castle would be really good for hide and go seek

In the guard rooms

The Welsh Flag

The view of the inner courtyard from the front guard house

Even in ruins, the castle in an imposing fortress

And it didn't even rain on us!