Friday, 30th May Newport

Robyn writes: A very busy day today! Yesterday evening was lovely and fine, but then overnight we had quite heavy rain again. The morning was beautifully fine, though, so Lex decided to go for a walk. He climbed the mountain which overlooks our back yard, the "Garth" - not quite to the top, but to one of the ridges overlooking the town. He met a lot of sheep and several other walkers. This feat took quite a while and he was rather hot and sweaty when he got back a bit after 10!

 Looking down towards Taffs Well

I spoke to Cait via Skype and pottered around, trying to get things organised as this is our last day here and we need to pack. Once Lex got back, we decided to head first of all for the famous "transporter" bridge near Newport. This was built during the years 1902 to 1906 to solve the problem of needing a bridge but still needing to be able to get tall ships under it. There are two huge supports, a walkway and carriage across the top, and a large gondola is carried across from side to side. It holds cars and people. It's an amazing piece of technology that still works wonderfully well. We didn't take the car across on it, but rode across and back in the gondola, then climbed to the very top and walked across. (270 steps to the top! That's a long way...) The view was amazing, despite it being overcast. We walked to the other side, watching the gondola move across underneath us. Then we climbed back down the stairs on the other side and went into the control room to chat to the bloke in there about how it's run, and watched him take the gondola across and back. We then took the gondola back over to where our car was parked. For 2.75 pounds each, it was amazingly good value and kept us occupied for two hours!

 Newport transporter bridge - climbing up to the top walkway

 We made it to the top!

 On the gondola going back

 Views of the gondola going across

We decided that our next stop would be the Welsh coal mining museum, "The Big Pit". We met with a decided problem though when our satnav totally refused to co-operate and kept telling us "No route can be found". I turned the phone off, restarted it, tried again...same response! With no other address to go on, we tried Plan B, and we headed for Caerleon, the ancient Roman city of Isca. ("Portia" seemed quite delighted to take us there.) It is home to an amazing amount of Roman remains - last time we were here in 2006 we'd visited the baths, but this time, after a quick lunch at a local bakery, we went to the Roman Legion Museum and saw the displays of the incredible things they've dug up around the area. Being a Welsh museum, admission is free, which is wonderful - I do love the Welsh! Caerleon was the home of a huge Roman fort - it stretched over almost the whole town area so obviously a lot of the remains will be lost under houses and other buildings, but some are still there in the fields around the town and have been excavated. The museum was really interesting, so we spent quite a bit of time there looking at the huge amount of finds and the replica Roman garden out the back then went out into the fields to scramble over the fort buildings and the amphitheatre. Both being very keen Time Team fans, we had a lovely time trying to interpret what was where (aided by the map in the book we'd bought!) and managed to get the scale of it into our minds. Very enjoyable, and despite the heavy cloud, the rain held off.

Above: the fun modern take on the Roman loo   and

below: what remains of one of the real Roman lavatoriums - Lex views the archaeology

 Me in the soldiers' barracks - eight men would share one room

 Views of the amphitheatre. The earth mounds were topped by wooden seating.

After Caerleon, we had one more place of interest to visit in the Newport area - the "14 Locks". This is an old canal area which had 14 locks in it in only half a mile to rapidly raise or lower boats. We started at the top which has one lock at the end of the long, flat old canal and from there it dropped rapidly. It's all disused now but some of the locks are in quite good repair, while others have totally disappeared. Would have been very time consuming and possibly scary going up or down that in a canal boat! The locks were built during the Industrial Revolution in 1799 and were an amazing piece of engineering for the time. After the railways became so popular, they went into decline and this stretch was finally closed in 1949. They started renovating in 2003 and I suppose it will depend on funding whether they ever get it completely reopened again. As we're going on a canal trip in northern Wales with Glen and Carol in a few weeks, we were very interested in the locks, though I believe (hope!) our trip will have considerably fewer of them! It was a lovely walk, anyway, and another interesting piece of history to finish the day.

 One of the top locks

The lower locks are in serious need of repair!

We got back home by about 6pm and as it was a (relatively) warm afternoon, we sat out in the back garden for a drink before tea (can of soup and bagel followed by fruit and yoghurt - easy and quick tea tonight!) Sooner or later we'll have to pack, but so far that's just not happening...tomorrow we are off to Pembrokeshire, and we're going to go via the Gower Peninsula, as we haven't got there yet and really want to see it. Fingers crossed for a fine day!