Wales Weekend, part deux

Waking up in the UK on vacation often means a "traditional" breakfast--English, Welsh, or Scottish depending on which country you happen to be in that day. Saturday morning in Wales, we didn't get a very early start on our sightseeing because we wallowed in the traditional breakfast.

We walked up the hill from the Osborne House to their parent hotel, the Empire, and I learned that American bacon is nothing like the bacon in the UK. What we call bacon, they'd probably call dried out scraps of fried pig fat. What they call bacon, we'd call ham--with lots of tasty fat around the edges. I'm pretty sure I ate my weight in that kind of bacon while we were travelling. The traditional breakfast includes bacon, eggs, hash browns, a grilled tomato and mushrooms, dried cereal, porridge (oatmeal, I think), fruit, croissants , muffins, or other breads, coffee, tea, or hot chocolate ... and don't forget the yoghurt. Always the yoghurt. EDIT: I forgot--baked beans, too.

For this feast, hotels often charge upwards of about 25 American dollars--sometimes more. Per person. Probably more like 15 in a more economical spot. But suffice it to say, it was not necessary to eat lunch on any day we ate the traditional breakfast, or for that matter, the continental breakfast--everything but the hot, cooked items.

We finally mustered up the energy to head out to Caernarfon Castle after we could get the seatbelts around our bellies again. And did I already mention what a great job Todd did driving on the left side of the road? Although, may I just say thank goodness for Gwyneth, our very cultured SatNav lady, who gave us this advice on many occasions--"If possible, make a U-turn." A nice way of saying, "Wrong way, idiot!"

The best and worst things about the roads in the UK are the roundabouts. They're great for keeping the traffic flowing--we rarely sat in backups or had to wait for a stoplight, because there just aren't many in the areas where we were. The worst thing is trying to count how many exits you've passed when you're driving in a crazy circle and Gwyneth says, "At the roundabout, go straight on, take the second exit," or "At the roundabout, turn right, take the third exit." I'm pretty sure we got it down really well the Thursday before we left.

It was pretty thrilling to realize as we headed southwest from Llandudno that we were only about 100 miles as the crow flies from Ireland. Also pretty frustrating because we'd cut a day trip on the ferry from itinerary when we realized how many places we wanted to go and how little time we really had. Ireland will have to wait for a much longer trip in the future.

Caernarfon Castle (which seems to be pronounced car-nav-run by the locals) was the first (OOPS! Second?) fortress built by King Edward I when he conquered Wales. It's where his son, Edward II, the first Prince of Wales, was born and where the investiture of Prince Charles, the current Prince of Wales, took place in 1969. Legend has it the Welsh were not crazy about being invaded, but asked Edward I for representation by one of their own who spoke their language. He responded by having his wife bear their son in the castle, proclaiming little Edward II was thus a Welshman, and his first language was Welsh by default.

It's pretty sobering wandering on and through the walls of an ancient castle, realizing it's been there nearly 800 years and you're walking where people walked 800 years earlier, where kings were born and much blood was shed in loyalty. In effect, where history was written. History was written everywhere, obviously, but most of the oldest structures we can physically visit in the U.S. are only a few hundred years old. I remember being amazed at the 400 year old structures in St. Augustine, Florida, and now they seem like kids, you know? It's also interesting to realize how soundly they were built, to last so long--when construction technology as we know it didn't even exist a hundred or so years ago.

And that's probably why I feel justified in presenting you with 120 photos of our afternoon at Caernarfon Castle and the surrounding area. It sounds like a good excuse anyway. :) Many of them look alike, but if you pay attention, I'm sure there are subtle nuances that cried out, "Pick me! Pick me!" as I loaded them up to flickr. A bluer sky? A fluffy cloud? A single, more delicate blade of grass? Is this working? Don't forget you can click on "show info" to see corny captions.

For my less patient readers, I've included some here, just for you. (Click to see them full size.)

We ended the day with a meal at a Mediterranean restaurant back in Llandudno, where we learned to order "tap water" if we didn't want to pay for a tasty but expensive bottle of water.

Is this a dream?

On a note completely separate from my current obsession—my travels—I thought I'd mention I received feedback on my manuscript from my deaf characters expert. Her suggested edits were quick, quite painless, and so helpful in making my story better. And it appears she genuinely liked it, which is a big bonus. She was an invaluable, providential find.

I've already fixed things up and I'm making final tweaks as I get ready to send it out to the world. I'm getting butterflies in my stomach just thinking about it.

There's a decision to be made. In the publishing world, things really slow down in December and early January, and it's not always advisable to send queries out during that time period. Should I start sending with it being so near the beginning of December or wait until January? Can I stand not to? I've waited this long, I need to do what's best for my "baby," but I think if I can send a few soon, as in the week right after Thanksgiving, I might be okay.

Any thoughts from you seasoned, published writers who stop in now and then?

A weekend in Wales, part one

Little by little, I'm posting photos to my flickr account. They're uploading pretty fast, which is good considering I took about, um, two thousand photos. Yeah, seriously. That's what happens when you buy a speedy new digital camera and card that holds up to 1,700 photos and uploads to your computer at lightning speed! I promise not to upload every single one, but you asked for photos, so you got 'em, Toyota.

I'm what's called a bracketer in photography lingo. To photographers, that means I frequently shoot the same scene many times in hopes of getting at least one really awesome result. In lay terms, that means my husband gets really bored (however patiently) while we're on vacation. I try hard to speed things up, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist, you could say. I used a new camera on this trip (Panasonic Lumix TZ5), which was lighter by about a ratio of 1:4 to my old Canon G5, has a fantastic 10x optical zoom, but was still new to me and thus did not always perform in the way I was used to or wanted. Got some decent pictures, nonetheless, and my back is still thanking me for the featherweight camera.

This first batch of photos is relatively small. I collapsed into my bed Thursday night after nearly 24 hours with very little sleep (having Enchanted playing right in my face during the best hours for sleep on the plane was not especially helpful! Should have taken an eye mask.).

Friday morning, I took my time getting ready to hit the road while Todd did laundry for the first time. He found a launderette relatively close to the hotel, but soon discovered it only took one pound coins and 20 pence coins. Fortunately, another customer volunteered to get him the right change when she ran out for a moment--and she actually came back with it. He had her laundry hostage, so it was a pretty safe bet.

A pound or twenty pence sounds reasonable, right? Until you consider that's about $1.50 or 30 cents in U.S. funds (cheap right now--the exchange rate was entirely in our favor on this trip at about 1.5 dollars to one pound when it's usually $2 to one pound) and it took a bunch of those coins for each load to wash and and dry. Seems like it ended up costing about six to eight dollars per load. Not as expensive as the hotel, which charged about $5.00 to launder one pair of jeans, though!

So, we headed out around lunch time for our first destination--Llandudno, Wales. Not all of the place names in this unique country are that easy to pronounce. We didn't know how to say it the entire weekend. We kept meaning to ask someone, but kept forgetting. Finally, when describing our weekend later, a few people pronounced it Lan-dud-no. Just like it's spelled. Nothing at all like Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch. They call that place in North Wales Llanfair for short. It means, "The church of St. Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St. Tysilio's of the red cave." We didn't go there. (At least, not that I remember.) It would have taken too long to enter the name in the GPS system. :)

In Wales, every sign or document is supposed to be printed in two languages--Welsh and English--because Welsh is the official language. It was fun getting all tang-tungled trying to pronounce these words and names. Welsh is not based on any other language, I don't believe, so it's no use trying to figure out how the letters translate from one language to the other.

At any rate, we made the 80 mile trip from Preston to Llandudno in about 4 hours. Yep, it was a holiday weekend and the kiddos were out in force, trying to travel from one spot to another on the very limited number of major motorways.

When we got there, though, we were greeted by one of the most pleasant surprises ever. Our bed and breakfast in this instance was absolutely the best place I've ever stayed. The Hotel Hana Maui on our honeymoon was only a fraction of a place behind, but the Osborne House did NOT have lizards or bugs crawling all along the walls and floor, and only cost about half as much per night, so that gave it a little edge. (The Hotel Hana Maui cottages are open air, so there's not much you can do about the little critters. It's totally worth putting up with them, though, for the beauty of the place.)

If you go on a trip to a foreign country, you should really stay in a dump so you want to get out and see the sites. At the Osborne House, Chef Michael Waddy, his wife, and inlaws make it very difficult to want to leave the cozy luxury of their hotel, even to see the beauty of Wales. It turns out Mr. Waddy is from San Antonio, just down the road from us here in Texas. I asked how he ended up in Wales 14 years ago, and he said, "A pretty Welsh girl with long legs."

The food that came out of his kitchen was my first real meal in the UK (does that count?), and it was delicious--even our first taste of a national favorite: mushy peas. They were mashed with some kind of garlic seasoning, and though we'd been warned against mushy peas, we really want this recipe now.

If my memory serves me well, because the Internet isn't helping me here, the Osborne House was one of the original dwellings built in the Llandudno area, way back in the 1700s. Our room was one half of the top floor, and was actually a suite of two rooms--a bedroom and sitting room--plus a big bathroom with an old-fashioned clawfoot tub and even a separate water closet with a a pull-chain toilet! Maybe more than you wanted to know, but I thought it was pretty nifty. Antiques everywhere, comfy sofa and chairs, down and feather duvet and pillows, homemade shortbread cookies ... are you drooling yet? I don't have to stop there.

A working gas fireplace and real candles to light were quite romantic. How often could that legally happen in a U.S. hotel? I even halfway hoped when the lights went out the place would be haunted because it was that authentic feeling. Alas, no ghosts or crazy noises, even though it was Halloween. Turns out all the crazy night noises were in Edinburgh the next weekend.

Well, in spite of my promise to not do a long, boring, overly detailed travelogue, I've only managed to tell you about the first six or seven hours of my adventure. Sigh. I guess I'll have to continue another day.

You can go to my flickr site here and here to see all the photos from the first day or so. Click on "info" at the top of the page to see my oh, so creative captions or explanations.

Home again

Well, I'm back in the real world and feeling the pull of the blog, but I'm still processing the trip to the UK. Slowly digesting it, trying to decide exactly what to regurgitate to you. (Ew. Sounds icky, right?) There is so much to tell and I don't want to simply post a long, boring, overly detailed travelogue. I'm perfectly capable of doing that, let me tell you. I'm sure you don't doubt it.

All I can say for sure at this moment is that what I've heard is true--traveling beyond your own country changes you. I've been to Canada and Mexico, but Mexico was years ago, and Canada (Toronto) felt so close to home it wasn't the same.

Meantime, these are a couple of pictures just to hold you, and I hope you'll stick around and be patient with me until I figure it all out.

The first two are the back window view from the first B&B we stayed in at Llandudno, Wales. The picture below is the view from the front window, a crescent shaped beach on the Irish Sea. Yes, we had two views. It was the most amazing B&B ever.

More soon!

(If you look closely, you can see a reflection of my camera off the window glass. The window opened, but a cold, brisker than brisk winter wind blew right into the room with it open, so I took refuge behind the glass!)