Day 37
Burry Port to Llanelli: 4.5 miles (I know, I know)
Food of the Day: Peanut Butter Cup Milkshake at the American Diner in Llanelli
Reason: Admittedly, everything tastes good when you're hungry all the time from walking. But this was actually a very, very good milkshake.
Pre-Urban hiking
So it's getting clearer and clearer that I'm getting close to the urban zones of southeast Wales - Swansea, Newport and Cardiff. Although the Wales Coast Path goes south along the coast of Gower before getting to Swansea, the trains run Carmarthen-Llanelli-Swansea-Cardiff, and as far as I can tell, this area is the edge of the urban corridor.
Not that the walk today was particularly urban - it was actually very green. But unlike wilder parts of the trail, this was almost entirely man-made parkland - the Millenium Coastal Park, to be exact. It's pretty nice - I passed many lookouts, a hill sculpted to look almost like a whirlpool, a rugby memorial sculpture, and lots of tall silver pillars with a vertical eye-shape cut out in the middle - the latter are the markers for the Coastal Park.
Besides the trains rushing by every so often, the walk was quick but enjoyable, with my first close-up views of the Gower peninsula. I first thought I'd caught a glimpse of it from Tenby to Pendine, but then I also thought at the time I might have been halleucinating.
Anyway, there it was, right across a narrow strip of water, connected pretty closely to Llanelli and Swansea. I do wonder how a place that people consider remote can be this close to an urban area, but we'll just have to wait and see.
Llanelli
The main thing I learned in Llanelli is that it's pretty hard to stay in a town whose name you can't pronounce. With the double double L's in there, the best I can tell Llanelli is actually pronounced thxh-an-ethxh-ee, which includes several noises I can't get my mouth around, nevermind try to spell phonetically. Getting tickets for busses and trains wasn't great. It was literally taking me 5 minutes to explain where I was going.
Anyway, the other thing about Llanelli is it actually has a really good selection of foreign food restaurants. Comparatively anyway. At its center is a giant mall. In this mall was a giant Nando's and a giant diner called 'American Red 10 Diner' or something like that. There were American flags and a Statue of Liberty, and inside were a random smattering of American football shirts and more flags. And they actually made a pretty good shake. And the Thai place down the street was actually really, really good. And I didn't go into the Polish place but it looked good too.
And I was staying in a bed and breakfast that I'd found on Booking.com (which always seems to have one much cheaper option than every other website in every Welsh town I've been in) run by a very kind Lithuanian couple (I think they said Lithuanian. It actually might be Latvian and yes I know the two are very different I just honestly can't remember. Whichever one has lots of NBA players). Anyway, although it didn't have a sign I got a very large room and I got to take an evening bubble bath for almost nothing, and it was near the train, the buses, the coast, the mall, everything.
Anyway, I can't say Llanelli isn't a bit rough around the edges - it certainly has seen better days in it's history as tin plate capital of the world (it's symbol seems to be a tin pan) - but I thought it was a really convenient place to stay. But I might just have been really hungry, which is entirely possible.
