I was pretty insistent on us getting out to do something with Caby's family, despite them being in France for a third of the trip. I like seeing the big classic Wales-y stuff with them, and Margam Park (a big park, gardens, and petting zoo place) kept coming up when we asked for suggestions for good places to spend days out. We were also going to hit up the amusingly-named Big Pit, which is a museum all about caves and coal mining, but the scheduling failed us on that front. Boo-womp, next time maybe.
Still! Margam was nice. It's fairly wide open and winding, between forest trails (which really had me feeling like I was back in Pennsylvania, and I swear I've visited similar places on school trips) and these big hills and fields that really give off the sense of having found the edge of the world—at least, until you crest the other side of the hill.
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The petting zoo area was interesting—mostly a spot to sit down, watch children stress out the animals, and watch Caby's family stress out each other. I was so glad to get that shot of that one goat by himself just standing there, menacingly, and you gotta love a hit of freshly-sheared llamas. (Yes, Caby did sing the llama farmer song from Horrible Histories, as is only correct.) There was a lovely lake a bit further down where her and I sat for a while, watching ducks have free reign of the place, before we rejoined the family discussing panel shows at a picnic table nearby.
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Alas, my camera would soon run out of juice, right about the time we got to the castle and gardens. It was just as well, since we couldn't go in (though the gift shop was open, natch, and there were badgers). Tal's infodumping actually came in handy—he said that the reason these old cameras discourage the use of alkaline batteries, like all I had on me, was because alkalines have a much harsher voltage dropoff when they get close to drained than, say, nickel-cadmium or lithium-ion. Interesting! I still don't have nice rechargeables for these old cameras, but I think I'll invest in some for my next big adventure.
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I did get a bunch more pictures on my phone, including of the hilariously-too-small-for-this-group-of-weirdly-tall-adults fairy tale park where you can go into tiny recreations of Victorian houses freakily painted up with nursery rhymes, but nothing I really felt like digging out for this. That said, the playground in the fairy tale park did have this crazy spinner seat (as in, you sit and other people spin you in it really fast), and Trys fucking fell trying to get out of it, though he was ultimately fine. I also took my turn and had much better luck recovering after. I remember her dad got videos of us all goofing off on this thing—I still need a copy of that. Very funny.