Ritas Ireland Dream: 20 April - GPS is Your Friend

Tredegar House built by William Morgan

After a very sleepless night conjuring up the worst-case scenario of driving the little blue Hyundi I took a sleeping pill and prayed I would see my grandchildren again. Trying to learn a different GPS system where you put in postal codes rather than address was overly stressful to figure out. After several calls to the Enterprise representative, who soon became my best friend or maybe I was his worst nightmare we did figure it out. There is no way you can go one block without GPS and I made it all the way to Newport, Wales through countless roundabouts and backtracking and it only took us an hour to go 20 miles. 😊

Why did we go to Newport? I had to go see the mansion that William Morgan built called Tredegar House. As many of you know Morgan is my family name from my father and all the first-born males are named William. It would be wonderful to be part of this arm of the Morgan line but it was not to be so. I did find out that the Morgans do retain many of the same traits all throughout history. They are good looking with thick black hair and brown eyes, like their ale, gambling, fighting and all-around BIG story tellers. Plus they marry beautiful women for their money. One of them even lays fame to be a pirate – He was Henry Morgan. Don’t believe it!

It was another beautiful spring morning as we walked through the Tredegar Gardens. They put on a Cadbury Easter Egg Hunt for the kids and children were everywhere. The beautiful grounds of green grass and flowers are so immense that you really didn’t notice the crowd until you saw the parking lot full to overflowing.

We then drove the 20 miles back to Cardiff so that we could see Cardiff Castle. After several trips around the grounds we realized that there was no way we would find a parking place. Remember all those people on those trains and busses coming into Cardiff, well now half of them were all trying to get into the castle. The other half headed for the Cardiff Bay which of course we headed for. This time we got the last parking spot in the car park. I’m starting to drive like all these Welshmen. There is no beach. It’s a bay surrounded with stone wall and tons of restaurants and all sorts of amusements for kids. It was body to body.

Churh built on Cardiff Bay by Norwegian Christians

You are not going to believe this, but we finally had lunch at Subway at 4:30pm. There was no way you could get into a restaurant and sit down. Most people were getting their food and standing anywhere they could. I will say the Welsh are a happy people as all you saw was people laughing and enjoying themselves. Of course, everyone of them had a pint of beer in their hand. We decided to get back to our B&B before they all got into their cars to drive home too. Yikes, think of a roundabout full of bunch of drinking Welshmen.

Tomorrow we hope to make it Easter Service. What we find is most of the old churches here are more for touring than for worshipping. Guess we’ll just set our GPS and pray God will do the leading WITHOUT roundabouts.