A young MINI enthusiast – Aaron – organised a MINI meet at St Fagans National History Museum, commonly referred to as St Fagans after the village where it is located. It is an open-air museum in Cardiff chronicling the historical lifestyle, culture, and architecture of the Welsh people. The museum is part of the wider network of Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales. The day out was organised via The Welsh MINI Group, an online Facebook group of MINI enthusiasts and it took place on Sunday the 11th October.

We left Malvern at 8.30 am in order to be at Cardiff West Services at Junction 33 of the M4 for 10.00am, where we were meeting the rest of the gang. We took two cars, Our MINI GP – ThunderBeast – and our JCW Coupe – SilverBeast – and had some fun on the drive down to Cardiff! From the services we all convoyed the short drive to the Museum. However, first there was the ritual of standing around in a carpark for an hour while we all admired the MINIs. Once at St Fagans we parked in a grassy overspill car park where we were all able to park together and get some good photos of all the MINIs. Inevitably then another hour was spent hanging around the MINIs as we repeated the exercise of admiring the cars and making new MINI friends. All good fun and an essential part of a MINI meet. Aaron just loves MINIs and I confess his enthusiasm certainly rubs off on me.

We then wandered around the open air museum where you can glimpse Welsh life through the ages. It makes for an interesting day out and below I have posted a few pictures from around the Museum. I shared a chicken and leek baked potato with Peanut for lunch and then ambled around some more after lunch with our old pals Debbie and Aston and Aston’s son Jenson. Great company and we always enjoy catching up with them.

Two thirty saw us back in the car park while a raffle was drawn for some MINI goods and then a few of us went to the OysterCatcher in Penarth for tea. Unfortunately they could not accommodate us so after some thought me and Peanut decided it was home time, said our goodbyes and drove the hour and a half back to Malvern. This time I was in SilverBeast and Chrissie was chasing in ThunderBeast, as with the morning drive down to Cardiff, this was a lot of fun! The conclusions from us both were unanimous. SilverBeast is faster, ThunderBeast handles better. SilverBeast is more refined, ThunderBeast is more fun.

All in all it was a lovely day out and it was exciting taking ThunderBeast on his first MINI meet. It was fun seeing all the other MINIs too, 2, GP1s, 2 GP2s about 5 F56s, 3 Roadsters and two Coupes plus many more MINIs.It was also good to meet old friends again as well as make a few new ones!