Cardiff, Wales- Saturday, July 27, 2013

After breakfast, we left our hotel in Bristol behind, crossed the Severn Bridge across the Bristol Channel, to enter Wales for the first time ever.  The signs were then in both English and Welsh.  Comparing the two, we quickly concluded that if we ever saw one in just Welsh, there would have been absolutely no way for us to guess what the English was.  We went into Cardiff, and parked the car.  We followed signs with Daleks on them, past the Welsh National Assembly, within site of the BBC studios, to the Doctor Who Experience.

The Doctor Who Experience begins with a "walk-through" presentation, where the 11th Doctor (played by Matt Smith) needs our help.   The TARDIS itself "materializes," and we enter it to find that it is, in fact, bigger on the inside.  Anna stood at the controls with several other kids to help fly us to help the Doctor, but Emma rode on Mom's back.  She didn't like the two Smilers who had been in the first room.  We found ourselves in a Dalek civil war, a garden of Weeping Angels (Emma hid her head but Scott kept his eyes as wide open as possible) and finally into the 2nd Pandorica, where we wore 3-D glasses for the climactic battle between the Doctor and his enemies.

The Doctor Who Experience is set up a lot like the Star Trek Experience that we saw in Las Vegas.  After your adventure with the Doctor, you get a chance to explore an exhibition filled with lots of costumes and props from the show.  We took a lot of pictures and video in this part.  There are costumes from each of the past eleven Doctors, several TARDIS exteriors and a few TARDIS interiors as well.  Upstairs from that section, there are costumes worn by companions like Rose, Martha, Amy, and Rory and supporting characters like River Song.  Julie loved seeing K-9 there.  Most of the great villains and monsters are there too, including several examples of Cybermen and Daleks, showing how they've changed over the years.  There were some angels and the big headed dolls that Emma doesn't like.  They might have had some of the Silence there too, but we don't remember.  Julie took lots of video as we went through, and then carried Emma through quickly to the exit.

Of course, there's a Doctor Who gift shop there, and Julie bought a shirt (It says, "It's bigger on the inside.") [** Correction: It says, "It's smaller on the outside!"] and some other goodies,  We ate lunch at the cafe at Doctor Who, and then explored the area around Cardiff Bay.   We found this recently developed waterfront to be clean and new, active and pleasant.  We had some ice cream and watched the scenery.  We went through Roald Dahl plaza, which was named for the author of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," and other children's books.  That seemed appropriate because Emma bought a copy of it in London and has already finished it once and started through it again.  We saw the famous front of the Millennium Centre, and had hoped to find the entrance to Torchwood Institute (from the TV show Torchwood), but it was completely covered up. The plaza had been turned into a summer festival for children and was filled with sand, trampolines, pools, and such things. The girls got balloons from people dressed as Mario and Luigi.  We went to the Visitors' Centre in the Millennium Centre, and saw a film on the recent revitalization of the area.  By then it was raining a little bit.  We got our car out of the parking ramp, and headed to our stop for the night- Oxford.

Our hotel is in a rest area this time, which means it's also connected to a food court.  We got Pappa John's for dinner as a result.  Coke is having a promotion here and in France where your bottles say "Share a Coke with..." and then it usually says some random name.  This time, we got one that says, "Share a Coke with Emma." 

We had time in the evening, so we drove about 11 miles around to South Oxford to do laundry at a launderette that we believed would be open.