This was a bit of a milestone on my challenge of catching all the Cardiff buses in that it would be the last that from Cardiff Bus Interchange. All the remaining ones don’t visit the bus station on their routes.
The 305 is another very windy and varied route. First of all it heads down to Cardiff Bay and then hugs the coast down to Penarth. After visiting Penarth Marina you have the excitement of the bus climbing the steep Paget Road into Penarth and then later going down Beach Road to the esplanade and Penarth Pier. The second half of the trip is somewhat less exciting as the route visits the suburbs of Penarth, Llandough Hospital and Dinas Powys. After an hour and a half it climbs up into Dinas Powys village centre.
I had my beverage in Beija Flor. I thought I was being somewhat ignorant by not knowing what Beija Flor was in English before looking it up and finding it is humming bird in Portuguese.
My time was a bit restricted, governed by the frequency of the return buses, so I satisfied myself with a brisk walk around Dinas Powys Common which appears to have sports clubs aplenty around the circumference to keep the inhabitants of Dinas Powys suitably nimble.
My book for the day was the Somme. I spend quite a bit of time researching people from the local area who fell in WWI and WWII but still find myself rather ignorant of the details of the Western Front. I visited the Dinas Powys war memorial conveniently near the bus stop and there I waited …. and waited and waited. From the bus app I could tell that by bus was just a few stops away but it had ground to a halt. I messaged Cardiff Bus who kindly responded telling me it had unfortunately broken down. Luckily the train station is not far away, saving me from a long wait.
I returned a few days later on the train to complete the journey home by bus and had completely the opposite experience. I arrived at the bus stop not having done much planning, looked at the timetable, kicked myself for missing one by three minutes, turned around and there it was …….. three minutes late.
