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.