Chester

Chester City Gate
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This morning we had a most enjoyable breakfast with our hosts around the kitchen table. we ate fresh melon from their garden and I enjoyed an English breakfast. Joe decided to still take it easy and only had tea and toast. We were quite happy with this B&B and would quite happily stay here again.

The original plan for the day was to have a quick visit of Chester to view the Roman built city walls and medievil town. Apparently this is a better representitive style of heritage town than York. Our host this morning however said it ws going to take nearly 6 hours to drive down to Bristol via Cardiff, so we decided to do a drive around the old town area and then head off. This turned out to be harder than we thought, as there is limited access to the touristy streets. I drove around in circles for a while, and after 45 minutes, we decided it was time to move on.

Exterminate... Exterminate...

Chester Church
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We headed off for a long driving day to Bristol via Cardiff, Wales. It was a drizzly day, so we were happy there wasn't a lot of sightseeing planned. Our fist stop was to be at the ruins of Tintern Abbey, which we plotted the google address into our GPS and we were on our way. It surpises us that there are major motorways going in every direction, and it is not until we get into the smaller villages that we get onto dual carriageway roads.

Our adventure for today was finding the abbey ruins. It seems that they were not where google said they were. We drove throudh arbor covered narrow country laneways and ended up in a private house driveway! No ruins in sight! We tried a differnt tact and the GPS took us around and about, and guess what - we ended up back at the same driveway. Next time, I'll use google earth and have a look at the satellite view to check out the ruins first!! Well of course by now in this cold rainy weather I was busting to go to the loo, and here we were in the middle of nowhere, trying to find some public ammenities. Well luckily enough we came across the Black Horse pub, so we pitstopped here and had a nice bite to eat for lunch.

Chester Houses
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Onwards we went towards Cardiff. Here we were to visit the Doctor Who exhibit. After what seemed like forever, we found the Red Dragon Centre and parked. Inside, we paid our $5 pounds to see the exhibits. This turned out to be costumes and set items from the TV show and a lot of textual infomration about the show. Of course there was the full size darlek saying "exterminate, exterminate". Joe was eager to purchase a sonic screwdriver, but could not find one in the gift shop. Apparently the exhibition is closing for refurbishment and they are not topping up the souvenier items in the shop. Their last screwdriver was sold two weeks ago!! oh well, it only took us 30mins to complete the exhibition, so it was back in the car and back-tracking down the freeway.