Cardiff - Ready or not

Last week was rather hectic, going to and from Wales twice. The first time (up Wednesday, back Thursday) was to see the 30th anniversary tour of Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds" at the Cardiff International Arena.

Yes, I know it was on much nearer to home, at both the Royal Albert Hall and the O2 - but have you tried to get back to south London by public transport from either of those late at night? So, as Luc has family in Newport, we arranged to stay with them and drive into Cardiff for the show. Added to which, I hadn't seen Luc's mother for almost 18 months, so I was able to kill two birds with one stone, if you'll forgive the expression.

In the main, the plan worked.

According to the map, there are any number of car parks near the CIA, of which David Street is supposed to be one of the best. It probably is but, due to a large amount of redevelopment currently going on around the CIA, a lot of the roads are closed - with very little advance warning (in either language).

We made the turn that should have taken us into David Street, only to find the road was closed. Unfortunately, several vehicles had followed us, so it was a matter of "wait you turn" to ..... well, turn.

So we turned into a street where parking was indicated, and found the car park was open air and full. At least we were somewhere near the head of the queue to turn round this time .....

So we found an NCP multi-storey, still only a few minutes from the CIA.

The show was amazing. We had been worried that it might be a let down, but it was better even than we had hoped.

Then we joined the queue for the car park.

Of course, you have to pay for whatever length of time you've parked before you go back to your car, and the car park we had used wasn't exactly geared up for a couple of thousand people all coming out of the CIA and wanting to pay for their parking at the same time. In fact, it had just two machines. So we queued for around 25 minutes - and made friends with the guy behind us in the queue, even though his opening line of "So where did you come from for this?" didn't work out quite as he had expected; I think he thought his own journey from Weston was a winner .....

We were lucky. We got to the head of the queue and paid for 3 hours 51 minutes of parking (£3.50). If we had exceeded four hours it would have cost £8.00, so we were grateful the queue wasn't longer.

By this point it was almost 11 p.m. and we were starting to feel a little hungry. Luc remembered a wonderful burger bar he used to go to about 16 years ago when he belonged to a motorbike club in Cardiff, and reckoned it was on our route home, so we headed out to Broadway. He wasn't sure which exact corner it was on as, over the last ten years living in London, he's not been a regular customer .....

As we approached a corner, there was a little place all lit up. "It's still open! ..... No it isn't!" as the lights went out at 11.00.

But that wasn't the right corner. The next one was - and the place we were looking for was still open. Ok, it had changed names, but the menu was still the same. So we ordered blue cheese burgers (the main reason why Luc remembered the place).

It was a warm night so, once we had the burgers we headed to the tables and benches
outside the shop. It was rather surreal, eating burgers at a wooden table at 11.30 at night, but they were every bit as good as expected. The conversation with a local cycling home from the pub wasn't bad either. And then the guy from the shop strolled out and said to Luc "Haven't seen you for a bit. You used to be regular fifteen years ago when Nick owned it".

So I can't quite work out whether Cardiff is geared up to deal with people or not. It seems that the big organisations aren't, but the small ones are willing to try that bit harder.