In my childhood I spent many traumatic holidays in North Wales, in places with impossibly unpronouncable names with vrtually no vowels. Looking back at the postcards, I can see why I haven’t been back!
In my childhood I spent many traumatic holidays in North Wales, in places with impossibly unpronouncable names with vrtually no vowels. Looking back at the postcards, I can see why I haven’t been back!
2 Comments
Lysseus
18 May 2006 at 18:53Lol! That reminds me of my one and only holiday to Brecken. I’d not been to Wales except for the train trip from Bristol to Cardiff every day for a computer programming contract with BT. So a Brecken holiday seemed like a good way to explore more of Wales…
I was married at the time, and my spouse and and I piled into the car, packing the prerequisite 5+ books and notebooks and tape recorder with audiobooks for entertainment… Then we started driving deeper and deeper into a land that reminded me of everything I disliked about my childhood — i.e. farmland — down one lane roads bordered by stone walls so that if you did meet anyone on the road one of you had to back up for a quarter of a mile to let the other fellow pass.
We got to the hotel, which was surrounded by sheep (“Oh, look! There’s dinner outside our window!”) and began settling into the room, only to discover that they didn’t turn the heating on until after 5pm! Their idea of tv service were a few local channels and an odd collection of video cassettes, including Bambi. We did manage to request a heater for the bathroom, and to my great surprise the shower was actually a torrent of warm water, rather than the usual trickle of scolding or freezing hair-trigger affair.
We stayed the night and cancelled the reservation for the next day, deciding to go to a hotel in Cardiff where they at least offered the mandatory minimum of room service, snob that I am.
Sadly to say, the “midwest” of the US (i.e. Arizona) which is my current (albeit hopefully temporary) abode, is almost as spartan in their hotel accomodations. It seems like only the coasts have any notion of holiday refinement.
Vicki
19 May 2006 at 16:37In the interest of World Geography, the United States’ “Midwest” does not contain “Arizona”. Arizona is more-accurately, in the American South-West.
And I dare say the resorts in Flagstaff, Sedona, Scottsdale, Las Vegas, Denver and the general Colorado Ski Country resorts, and several dozen other hotels and resorts in the non-coastal US would disagree with your classification of “Spartan”. LOL! There are very many 4 and 5-star hotels and resorts scattered amoung our inner states!
If you’d like, I’ll volunteer to stay at each one each weekend until the list is exhausted. Your treat, of course, and with or without you!