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Our final decision was to meet each other in the Manchester airport terminal. I would leave from Dallas, after my work week was finished and would fly thru Atlanta. Lyn and Jesse would leave from Florida, thru JFK, and were scheduled to arrive at Manchester 45 minutes before me. We had looked to the Manchester airport web page to pick places to meet, but it was all such a mystery. What a needless worry. My flight was uneventful, but very long. I cannot sleep on airplanes. So I worked on my laptop, drank a lot of juice, and dozed for 10 or 20 minutes. I arrived at 9am, feeling like 3am, having been up for 36 hours on 20 minutes sleep. As I walked from my gate toward UK customs and immigration, I was surprised to see Lyn and Jesse sitting on an airport lounge chair waiting for me. My surprise was that, when I sat down they sat each on one side of me and, after counting to three, pounced and began to strangle me. Their trip, it seems, was different from mine. They were one row in front of a crying baby, and directly behind two arrogant, brassy, whiny New Yorkers (is that redundant) that reclined their seats on the JFK runway and did not put them back up until landing in Manchester. They had had a long night, and were equal parts groggy and grumpy. We all passed thru immigration (in about 3 minutes) then got our luggage. We passed thru customs (in 1 minute) and our vacation started. We were stunned to load up an airport luggage cart with our suitcases and pass thru the ‘green door’ for entering non-EC tourists. I presume we were watched on closed circuit TV because NOBODY stopped us to review, inspect, look or even talk to us about our stuff. We walked thru one door, down a short hallway, then thru a second door, and (TaDa!). we were in the UK! So much for all my worries about having to run the boarder. We stopped at an ATM in the airport terminal to pick up some pounds, then walked over to Hertz and got our car. It was very weird to drive the reversed arrangement (I refuse to say ‘on the wrong side’). We got a new red Toyota van. Very American of us. Everybody there drove cars smaller than a Ford Fiesta. Throughout the trip, whenever we passed a van similar to ours, it had no fewer than seven adult passengers (one even had nine). But the three of us reclined the seats and Jesse took a little nap, in standard American size and comfort.
The hardest place to drive is, of course, a parking structure (say, at the airport). It took us over 30 minutes to just figure it all out. Very, very weird for the first 10 minutes, looking in the wrong mirrors (couldn’t even use my hands and eyes to adjust them), driving against the learned traffic direction, and petrified to back up in close confines (like, say, an airport parking structure). To top it all off, the car was way oversized for the typical British parking spots, too (at the airport parking structure and for the duration of the trip). We finally left the airport property after stopping to buy some more roadmaps (1 hour elapsed). We scouted Manchester a little, drove back to the airport then back into town, getting the hang of the car while trying to decide the best place to stay for our last night, two weeks hence, when we would fly out of Manchester back to the USA. We eventually decided on the Holiday Inn Express right on the property at the Manchester Airport. We also started our search for a British equivalent to ‘Wal-Mart’. My plan was to buy an ice-chest to keep sodas, milk cartons, and some snack food in the car. We do this on all of our US vacations, but we didn’t want to haul a clunky ice box with us on the way over. We figured to just buy something cheap and then toss it out when we left. We also wanted to buy a bed-pillow, for the kid to nap on while we drove, again something we use on vacations in the states. We quickly learned that the UK is the land of terrible shopping. It was 3 full days before we ever had our ice-chest (a deplorable one at that), and we finally gave up on the pillow and he snoozed on rolled up jackets (we probably should have just lifted a pillow from a hotel).
We We found a McDonalds and pulled in. Crawled to the building on our hands and knees, and had to figure out what to order and how to pay for it. We had hit an ATM at the airport so we had plenty of 20 pound notes burning in our pocket, but sifted thru the change (10 pence, pound coins) like a bunch of foreign tourists! A young mother at the next table, sensing our bewilderment and exhaustion, took time to introduce herself and welcome us to her country. We decided the trip was going to turn out all right after all. We tried to explain to her about a ‘Wal-Mart’ and an ‘ice chest’ but got only blank stares and then directions to a cutesy little shopping district filled with people buying the supplies of their daily life. It was as quaint and inefficient as one of those New England ‘antique towns’ but these were people buying and lugging sacks with milk and shoes and books. Hoo-boy, we were not going to have a good time shopping! We got turned around a dozen times in Manchester, ended up back to the airport, then back into town, finally pulled off in a parking lot and everybody shut their eyes for 30 minutes (Jesse shut his for 120). We woke up still groggy zombies,but a little less grumpy. Do you know the feeling where your eyes are just itching to close, your head has that little headache, your arms and legs hurt? Of course, drive on a reversed road, in tiny city streets laden with pedestrians, while learning to navigate clockwise traffic circles. We were lucky nobody got killed! We drove out of Manchester and over to Liverpool (I think, but the memory is a little fuzzy). We used the ‘motorway’ (freeway) and it was great! Of course it felt like you entered by driving down the exit ramp and so had little nervous breakdowns every time you merged. Brits are very good about minding your proper lane. We drove very slowly and cautiously the first few days so as a courtesy I pulled to the slow traffic lane. Unfortunately, I constantly went to the far right lane (US-style), the HIGH-SPEED lane. Very weird, met lots of nice people that way. It was 3 full days before I figured out which mirror to look into. At some point, I gave up the center mirror (couldn’t train my eyes to look there) and let Lyn watch it for me. She became my mirror watcher, so I guess she drove in the UK, too (she was, after all, sitting on the left hand "drivers" side). It was a hoot every time we went to get into the van. I would instinctively go to the left hand door, open it, and see that the steering wheel was on the other side. How many times? I lost count at 50! Lyn and Jesse would instinctively go to the car's right hand side looking for the sliding door to the back seat (like our Aerostar at home), notice again that there was no door and cross back to the left side. We must have looked like some kind of bizarre marching band, and we performed this little ballet three or four times a day every day of the entire trip. We drove to Liverpool and drove by the Cathedral and our first church ‘ruin’. I still don’t know exactly what it was, but we took some pictures. The hardest part was parallel parking the van on a steep hill on a teeny-weeny narrow British street (after making a turn-around). We finally got out the camera and took some pictures. In general, Liverpool was kind of run-down, an older town with remnants of an old boom that has passed. Lots of vacancies. It just looked tired. Liverpool sits on an inlet, that you need to cross via a tunnel. We passed on the idea of seeing the ‘Beatles museum’ (said we see it next time) and took off for Wales (now around 5pm). As we headed for Wales, we skipped the motorway and used ‘blue highways’. We followed the maps, using local routes. Two lane blacktop (still unnerved from left-side driving) through UK countryside and quaint hamlets filled with semi-detached houses. We missed a couple of turns, got the hang of our new GPS gizmo and the mapping software on the laptop. We were starting to feel empowered. Generally the drivers were courteous and patient with us. Lots of duplex homes. Don’t know what I was expecting but I wasn’t expecting that. Very few single-family homes, very few vast Euro-style apartments buildings. The British row houses famous in "Hard Day's Night" were really only in cities and then only rarely there. Lots of duplexes, with little gardens in front and little driveway aprons to park the little cars. Oh how cute!
After dinner, we crossed into Wales and got a big kick out of the bi-lingual signs in English and Welsh. Crymmmerdion and gymbyynic and similar gibberish. Nice rolling hills, fields filled with growing grasses and crops. Some sheep here and there. Little church steeples popping out all over. Little towns and nice gas stations and terrible grocery shopping. We found the ABCO, the equivalent of US-style home center super market – groceries plus miscellany – and stocked up on fruit and sodas
Twenty minutes later we followed the signs and stopped at
historic Bodelwyddan castle. It was Friday night, and signage clearly
stated that the place was rented out on Fridays and Saturdays (for
weddings?) so we were chased off by the security guard. We made it to Llandudno around 7:30, the point in our route to turn south and drive inland to our B&B for the night and it was barely dusk. At the end of June, at the far northern latitudes, the sun didn’t set until 9pm and you didn’t see stars till at least 10:30. I was totally exhausted once again, couldn’t keep my eyes open even one more second. We pulled the van into a little beachside car park along the Irish Sea, watched the sun set on the water, reclined our seats, and dozed off again for another 20-30 minutes.
He finally resolved for me how to pronounce the name of that little town in Wales. Earlier in the day, we had asked several people (all from England) and each had pronounced it “Betsy-Code”. Our proprietor tried to explain Welsh phonetics, taking time to talk about double-L’s and middle-Y’s. The preferred Welsh pronunciation, he explained, was very close to “Betch-ye-Co-ed”. I was starting to enjoy being abroad. I laid in bed, simultaneously exhausted and wired, and tried to watch the game a little, getting a kick out of the English announcers. We all fell asleep (crashed?), had tumultuous dreams, and had a dickens of a time waking up in the morning even with sunrise being before 5am.
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Copyright, 1999, all rights reserved |
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Originally Written November 1999 |
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The
real trick to driving over there isn’t so much the
road direction as it is the gear shift levers. The shift lever and
turn indicator is on the left side of the steering wheel post, and
the wiper lever was on the right. For the whole two weeks I would get
in the car, start the engine, check my mirrors then start the wipers.
I would then turn off the wipers and put the car into gear instead. I
had the same problems with the turn indicator, too, and it became
somewhat entertaining during light rainstorms (turn indicator on but
no wipers) or confusing traffic circles (wipers on but no turn indicator).
We
stopped and had dinner at a pub! It turns out, this is
the equivalent (roughly) of eating at a ‘family restaurant’
in the US. Had fish and chips (of course) and a mix of other
interesting stuff. It worked out great. Had our first run in with 6
oz warm cokes. After 4 or 5 days, I learned to ask of ‘a
pint’ of Coke (US-Style). Lyn had ‘fizzy orange’, a
local favorite – mixture of OJ and club soda, that we drank
often but I never quite bonded with. I just liked the sound of
ordering a ‘fizzy orange’.
On
the way west along the Welsh north coastline, we saw
from the freeway the ruins of Rhuddlan castle. We had to stop. It was
around 5pm on a Friday, so the place was locked up tight, but we
pulled into the car park and shot some pictures. We were astounded to
see, almost off-handedly, structures that were 400 years old during
the American Revolution. There were scaffolding around one of the
ancient turrets, and I found that comforting as a sign that the
locals considered these structures part of their Heritage and worthy
of some funding for maintenance and repair. After ten minutes of
invigorating fresh air, we were off again heading west on the motorway.
But
first we took a couple of nice long shots of the castle and the
nearby church steeple, wrapped up in spectacular green fields and
foliage. When we later we saw some tourist brochures about
Bodelwyddan, it was full of antiques and other stuff (perfect for
wedding receptions) but not what we went to the UK to see. So while
we missed going inside, we didn’t feel cheated.
We
woke up and headed for 
