More from the Beehive

Saturday we awoke to rainy morning that eventually turned into an all day rain. Fortunately we made the call early that we would swap Rambling Day (Saturday) with Castle Day (Sunday) and we decided to head back to Wales to see Caerphilly Castle. We started for Caerphilly last weekend but were distracted by a Mothering Day Sunday dinner and never made it there.

Caerphilly Castle is yet another place that makes you realize just how serious people were about defending their turf 800 years ago. Not only did they build double walls around it, they put it plunk in the middle of a man made lake. Actually, it shows how serious the rulers were about protecting themselves from the other would-be rulers. Turns out in this case it was the Normans, again, “protecting themselves” from the Welsh …. more about Welsh/Norman (a.k.a. English) relations later.

Like most castles, Caerphilly has a lovely visitor’s center, complete with helpful staff and in this case the employee of the week award goes to Julian … helpful, friendly and entertaining. Being the tourists we are, we were not quite sure how to get past the simple chain fence between the visitor center and the castle entrance … should we step over, undo the link connected at the post or what? Julian suggested we could “ bust through like a bunch of renegades or use the door.”

So the castle was really cool and very impressive, like most of them we’ve seen. Not too worry, we’re a long way from tired of castletourism, much more to come.

After an hour or so at the castle we returned to our two favorite pastimes, pubtourism and foodtourism, both of which we pursued in a pub that occupies what was once the town court. It also happens that this pub sits directly adjacent to the castle, so we got a really good shot of the side door. (see below). Something pretty creepy about that side door and I’m thinking it was a lot better news if you were coming in or out of the front door, rather than the side door.

After lunch, a pint and watching Wales wale on Italy in the “Six nations Rugby Tournament” (30-13) we drove back to Cheltenham to watch more rugby at our favorite local establishment, The Beehive. We watched Scotland beat Ireland (16-13) due to a very late penalty and then we watched England lose to France in the last of the Six Nations games. France won the gold medal in the Six Nations competition going 5-0.

So, back to that funny Wales/England thing …. Watching the England vs France game at the Beehive four young gentlemen came into the pub fresh off the train from Cardiff (Wales) having watched the aforementioned Wales drubbing of Italy. Three of the four are native Welsh living in Cheltenham and in fact one of them even speaks Welsh. When the game ended with France winning, our four Welsh friends cheered! In fact they said when the US plays England in the World Cup in June they’re rooting for the US ….I’ll believe it when I see it! We had always understood there was a little animosity amongst the four countries of the United Kingdom, but we really had no idea it was quite that deep.

Alright, last thing to mention about Saturday, we saw the easiest to please dog in the world. He was some sort of shepard, maybe a Border Collie mix of some sort, and he was clearly a regular at the Beehive since he had his own personal water bowl next to the fireplace. The great thing about him was that he loved to play fetch with the patrons, the really great thing about him was that he liked to play it with a bottle cap, the really really great thing about him was that he like to rattle the cap around in his mouth clinking off his teeth as part of the obligatory tussle before the throw. We don't have any photos of the Beehive yet to post, we will have to do that and add them later. MB is convinced the floor there has not seen soap since 1801, give or take a century.