OUR RETURN TO WALES

MAY 15, 2026

                                                                 Typical scene in a Cardiff Arcade

Just a quick note today as I am still suffering from jet lag - I managed to make it to 10:00 P.M. last night, which set a record for this week. Fran and I returned a few days ago from a fabulous three weeks in Wales. 

We visited four locations in three weeks, which was perfect for our travel style, laid back in the extreme. A week in two spots, three days in another, and two stays in Cardiff the capital which allowed us to adjust for flights across a continent and an ocean.

I wanted to show Fran Wales, which I had visited fifty years ago when I was only twenty and so poor that I tried to look as pathetic as I could at breakfast in the hostel so that someone might share some food that morning. I had a wonderful time in Wales on three pounds a day, which included a pound for one pint at a pub every night. 

Wales is a very small place with a very long history. It was the first of the Celtic lands surrounding England - Wales, Scotland, and Ireland - that was successfully conquered by the Anglo-Saxons and their Norman conquerors. The small population, divided by mountains and hills that functioned as mountains, led to a incredible sense of isolation that did not change much from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century. In the end Wales survived as a place apart from England due to this rugged landscape and a stubborn determination to cling to a language that resisted the advance of English.

Wales is a land of great rural beauty, sort of a slightly tamed Scotland that contains rugged coastlines and mountains in a very small area. It is about the size of New Jersey, but with 170 miles of continuous coastal paths and mountains that while only a few thousand feet in height are so rugged that they served as trials for expeditions to Everest. 

The sense of history is overwhelming. If you listen to Siri you will soon find yourself on roads that no one but a local has visited for a long time indeed. And these roads are hundreds of years old. We ate in more than one rural pub that had served travelers since Shakespeare’s time - the only thing that was different was that we now drove there instead of of arriving by stagecoach.

The biggest revelation of our visit was that while the countryside was almost exactly as I remembered it from 1976, urban Wales was totally transformed. Wales only has one real city, but the Cardiff metropolitan area contains almost half of the country’s population. In 1976, I didn’t even bother visiting the city, which was a relic of the industrial revolution with little charm, and a reputation for danger. Today Cardiff is a small city with one of the most vibrant downtown areas in all of Great Britain. Say what you will about lotteries as a tax on gullible poor people, but at least the British have used lottery funds in the last fifty years to spread economic and cultural development far from London. Almost every building of any value in the hinterlands since 1976 has been built with lottery funds, from theaters to museums to government infrastructure, so that cities throughout Great Britain have benefited and multiplied  this investment many times over in the private sector.

The space pictured in the image I’ve shown you today is an example of this renaissance. Cardiff’s downtown was organized around a series of urban arcades, Victorian shopping streets that were tailor made for a city with a climate similar to Portland. These arcades were pedestrian streets, one or two stories tall, that snaked throughout downtown and allowed for sitting and moving outside but out of the rain. Over a century they rose and declined and rose again as an incredibly civilized way to arrange what are very small shopping malls. Stores and cafes and pubs and restaurants, some almost a century old, have interiors and outside seating in the street under these skylights. During our short stays in Cardiff Fran and I established daily routines centered around these arcades, much like the natives around us. The sense of scale, the light, and the allowance for both movement and malingering made for a wonderful urban experience.