When in St. Helens

Sorry for the delay. It takes a while to upload more than 200 photos to Flickr, tag them, add descriptions, and watch them a few times while sighing and reminiscing. I've also been getting actual work done on my manuscript and query letter, by the way.

Where were we? Ah, yes, we were on our way back from Wales to Preston.

Monday morning after Wales, I slept. That afternoon, I forced myself to get up, get out, and at least attempt the public transportation because I knew without it, I'd be sitting alone in a hotel room the better part of two weeks. I managed to catch the bus in front of the hotel, ride into Preston proper, walk and shop a bit, and locate a Costa Coffee where I drank hot chocolate and waited for Todd to retrieve me. It was enough for my first day alone in England.

I discovered my favorite new store that afternoon. Marks & Spencer is like a mini Target, with a little bit of everything. They have a food section with all kinds of prepared items and basic groceries. A tourist's paradise for food on the cheap! I stocked up on scones (which were quite good, but very different from the more homemade variety), peanut butter and bread, and of course, dark chocolate digestive biscuits. Oh, and my favorite new beverage--diet sparkling orange juice. I've searched for it since coming home to no avail. I guess I could mix diet Sprite and OJ for the same effect. Ryan assures me he's been mixing OJ and Mountain Dew for years.

It also turns out English marshmallows are slightly different, and I like them. They're a little on the dry side, and that's just how I like my marshmallows. I brought home a bag from M&S--a mixture of pink and white sugarcoated yum!

We ate in a restaurant that evening that looked pleasant enough from the road and had open fires and friendly servers. Against the recommendation of a friend pre-trip, I ordered a hamburger because I really wanted to know what all the fuss was. She thought someone told her they were boiled, and that they were not good, but it turns out they are broiled. I'm no stranger to broiled hamburgers cuz that's how we got them growing up, but this was a rather large broiled burger that sunk in my belly like a stone. The fries were good, though, as they were most everywhere. It turns out the restaurant was part of a chain called Embers, only each one also has its own unique name. For the record, that was my last hamburger until I returned home.

The next day, I set out to ride the bus, then train, to Liverpool. Unfortunately, some crazy person chose that day to make a bomb threat, and the trains shut down for a few hours when I was approximately 10 minutes away from Liverpool by train, but no telling how long by foot or bus. We were put out of the train at St. Helens. St. Helen's what, you may ask. I dunno. Just St. Helens. It was not a tourist destination, but it turns out this was one of my favorite afternoons. I wandered, picked up a few books in some charity shops, bought the best shopping bag ever for 99p, and ate lunch in a restaurant I'm pretty sure hadn't seen any tourists before or since.

Carol's was a tiny little place, but the menu looked safe, affordable, and left little up to interpretation. Or so I thought. I learned a lot about dining in the UK there.

The waitress for this four or five table dining room asked what she could get me after I seated myself. I ordered a Diet Pepsi (which arrived with the requisite three ice cubes), and I thought I'd order my food after I perused the menu. I believe I was meant to order my food at the same time as my drink, but the waitress finally did return. I'd decided on a "jacket"--a baked potato on this side of the pond. You could choose a topping: chilli (always with two l's there), tuna, beans, or cheese.

When I asked if I could have chilli and cheese, the waitress's eyes got huge. "Chili and cheese?" she said. "How unusual!" I nodded and smiled and wondered what I'd gotten myself into. It arrived, though, looking much as it does when I order the same thing in Texas. Tasted good, too.

I decided on a scone with cream and jam for dessert, and the waitress returned a few moments later to inform me they were out of cream. I said that was fine, I'd just have it plain. I wasn't feeling like a huge fan of jam with no cream that day. "No butter?" she asked. I shrugged and said, sure, I'll have butter. I was already feeling pretty risky after having chilli and cheese on my jacket, but why not live on the edge, right?

Before I knew it, the waitress was rummaging behind the counter for another scone (they were packaged, but not too bad) and she said something about her daughter and then I lost her.

After I ate my scone (spread with butter, of course), I waited for a while, wondering how to pay. Finally, I went to the counter and asked if I should pay there. She said yes, and rang up my total, and I decided to be brave at that point and admit all my ignorance at once. I had no idea whether or not I was supposed to tip. The guide books advise that tipping is not consistent in the UK as it is here--15-20% of the bill for dining--and not expected in many places. The trick is figuring out where, and if so, what percentage. Ten percent seems to be norm, more or less. When I asked what was customary, the lady shrugged and said it wasn't expected, but I handed her a one pound coin (probably about 10% of my total) and she giggled.

Then I asked whether anyone had ever ordered chilli and cheese on their jacket and she said, "NO, never." I told her where I come from, you don't get one without the other.

At that point, the only other customers in the place, an elderly couple sitting by the counter, jumped in. "Oh," said the wife, "You're an American! I love Americans! They tip everyone, and they're always, 'Thank you!' and 'Have a nice day!' and they're just so nice!" She continued to rave about how well she and her grandchildren had been treated on four trips to the states, and I basked in her warmth. I'd been feeling a little lonely and isolated up to that point, and it was a welcome change.

Her husband began telling me stories of serving with Americans in the Korean and Viet Nam wars and a place called Burton Wood where the American soldiers shipped in and out or stayed when they were injured. ("Buh-ton Ward! Ward, like ward!" he said, banging the table when I couldn't understand his pronunciation of wood, smiling all the while.) He told me of American soldiers who always had candy in their pockets for the local children, and ones who married the girls and spirited them away to America.

His wife said he'd tell me stories until I told him not to, so I finally did when I felt it was time to leave. They gave me directions to a glass blowing museum, and I wandered over there for a bit and finally made my way back to the train, which was running again, and back to Preston.

And as it turns out, the waitress had been telling me how her daughter was happy because she'd already spread my scone with jam when they realized they were out of cream, so she got to eat it when I ordered it plain ... with butter.

I thought I was going to tell you about York in this post, but I guess that's for another day. That also means no Flickr link. Instead, I'll show you two of the five photos I took those two days right here. (I was resting my shutter finger after Wales.) No worries, I took plenty the next two days.

The first is St. Helens City Hall. The second is the war memorial in the square, with the first batch of what I'm sure became many, many more poppy-decorated crosses and arrangements. Armistice Day was a huge occasion while we were there, and the poppy is the symbol of rememberance. I have a particularly embarrassing story to share about this very thing while we were in Edinburgh.

Next stop, York.

Wales weekend, part troix

Packing up and leaving our wonderful B&B was sad, but we knew other wonders awaited, so that we did. We headed out for a drive around gorgeous Snowdonia National Park with a stop for an hour or so in the village of Beddgelert.

This little village was named for the legendary hunting dog of Prince Llywelyn the Great (the one King Edward later routed out). The prince was an avid hunter with a (also legendary) castle in the area. One day, Gelert, his dog, did not appear for the hunt. When his master returned, he was greeted by the site of Gelert with bloody jaws and fur. Finding his son's nursery with upturned cradle and blood everwhere, but no baby, he assumed the dog had attacked his baby son and was brokenhearted. He plunged his sword into Gelert's heart, killing the dog, then heard a baby's cry as the dog died. He flipped the cradle to find the baby, alive and well, and a wolf the dog had killed protecting him. Llywelyn was struck with remorse. To show his homage to his brave dog, he buried him outside the castle walls and marked the grave.

According to this site, legend and reality were quite mixed up, especially considering the cairn marking the grave is less than 200 years old, and this act would have happened in the 13th century, but it still makes an interesting story and likely keeps the little town (whose name means "Grave of Gelert") in business.

On the other hand, it's pretty high on charm alone. We enjoyed it and never even saw the grave. We wandered a bit and walked a little way up one of the many public walking trails around Snowdonia. I managed to cull my photos down to *only* 109. This day held some of the most breathtaking views of our trip, as well as architecture and landscape you might picture in your head when you imagine a place like Wales. It was that perfect.

Hope you enjoy them. Of course, I've posted a few here if you don't have time to look. (Or maybe to tempt you.)

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.

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!)