Why I had the Strangest Night of my Life in Cardiff Wales

I have a quick travel story for you today! This one takes place in Cardiff, Wales during my first trip to the UK in 2011. One of the reasons I love to travel is because of the stories that come from these travels and this is a good one. 

After 6 days in London we picked up a rental car (a standard, which is a whole other story), and hit the road. Our first stop was Stonehenge, which was amazing (and also another story), but took a little a longer than we had planned. So when we made it to our next stop and home for the night, Cardiff, Wales, it was already dark out. We checked into our hotel and then headed out for a night on the town!

It was a beautiful night but there is one thing we kept seeing on the streets of Cardiff … men in ridiculous costumes. 

I’m not kidding. 

There was a group of at least two dozen men in banana costumes, a Minnie Mouse, a Lucille Ball, another group of 20+ gnomes (Gnomeo & Juliet had recently come out), and another group that had donned bright red curly afros, which was underwhelming compared to the rest of the looks we had seen. 

Alex and I felt very confused as we enjoyed dinner and drinks and then headed back to our hotel for the night. We went to bed wondering what we had just witnessed, but sure that we wouldn’t be seeing any more bananas or gnomes in the morning.

We were wrong.

As we made our way to a late breakfast we saw the gnomes and bananas back and in full force at the entrance to a pub that had already started serving.

This forced our hand and we finally stopped to ask a group of older gentlemen all dressed smartly in their kilts what the heck was going on.

One of them gave us the following answer like it should have made all the sense in the world.

“When England plays Wales in test cricket on a Saturday, all the men go in fancy dress.”

What fancy dress originally meant was dress kilts. But eventually that evolved in to full on costumes like what we had seen.

So no, we hadn’t been hallucinating. We actually saw bananas, gnomes, Minnie and Lucille Ball walking down the streets of Cardiff. And that is why I had the strangest night of my life in Cardiff, Wales.