Day 66 of a Wales Coast Path thru-hike reads like the least glamorous entry possible — and that's exactly what makes it worth reading. The walker in this trail diary covered 19 miles with roughly 100 miles of the 870-mile route still to go, and nearly all of it was on hard surfaces: pavement, promenade, and road. No clifftop drama, no dune systems, just the unglamorous connector miles between Swansea Bay's industrial towns and the start of the final stretch.
The day's route ran out of Swansea and inland toward the coast, about nine miles that offered a couple of pleasant tree-lined paths along a waterway before reverting to road walking. The one bit of weather drama was almost comic: a single burst of rain lasting roughly thirty seconds, immediately followed by a rainbow over Aberavon's seafront promenade, which the diarist describes as genuinely lovely. Port Talbot — a town better known for its steelworks than its scenery — provided a lunch stop, and then the photos simply stop. Some days on a long trail are like that. You put your head down and walk.
What makes this entry useful for anyone eyeing the Wales Coast Path is the honest detail about the physical cost of road miles. The writer's feet, ankles and knees are complaining after hours on tarmac — a useful reality check for anyone imagining the whole path is soft coastal turf. Shoes matter too: at around 600 miles, a pair of trail shoes is well past its cushioning prime, and that wear shows up most acutely on paved sections. Anyone planning a multi-week walk here should budget for fresh footwear partway through, and consider gaiters or cushioned insoles for the urban stretches.
The geography here surprises some people. The Wales Coast Path is the first trail in the world to follow an entire national coastline continuously, and around the Swansea Bay area — Swansea, Neath, Port Talbot, Aberavon — that coastline is industrial and built-up rather than wild. These are the connector days between the Gower Peninsula's beaches to the west and the dunes and cliffs heading toward the Glamorgan coast. They're flatter and faster, which sounds like a blessing until your joints tell you otherwise. Fast and flat, as the diarist puts it, can still be ouchy.
For travellers, the takeaway is to plan around these sections rather than dismiss them. The promenade at Aberavon makes a genuinely pleasant walking stretch with its sea views, and Port Talbot is a straightforward resupply point with cafes and shops right on the route. If you're walking a section rather than the whole path, the Gower and the Pembrokeshire coast further west deliver the postcard scenery — but the flat Swansea Bay miles are a realistic, low-effort way to sample the trail if you're short on time or fitness.
The writer, meanwhile, has just over 100 miles to go on their full-circle walk of Wales. Based on the pacing so far — 66 days in — the finish line should be coming into view soon.
