Imagine a world...where you drive a car on a road built for horse & buggy, when 23 miles can take an hour to drive (without bumper-to-bumper traffic), pudding comes in the color black and isn't pudding at all, a castle very well may be part of your back yard, and a middle school gymnasium isn't called a Church one day out every week. For those of you that can't imagine this, it's ok, you don't have to. It's called England, and you only need a passport and some money to see these things I speak of. The wife and I took a road trip this past weekend, and let me just say for starters, road-tripping here gives me the feeling I imagine time-travelers might have. It's as if portions of the UK simply were not told that time has moved on and they can stop living like it's the 1800's. Oddly though, while many of their short-comings in the current future were mine and Robyn's foundation to numerous jokes, there was admittedly something nice about their archaic take on life.
Lesson One: "Do you have a booking?"
So a heads up to anyone planning a visit to the UK, they really like their "bookings." Naturally, when we Americans plan any trip whence me might require room and board, we know the Mecca of answers...Google-it. This is a foolproof plan for a country that has an abundance of internet. Allow me to set the standard now for you. In America we have fantastic internet basically everywhere, so much internet that we started utilizing it on our phones nearly everyday. Here in the UK...you are lucky to have a signal to make a phone call. As for broadband, it's not really a a household item yet for most of the English. So when you are trying to "book" a room when you are traveling out of area, it does pose more challenges than you might think. And when it comes to finding that place to eat at the end of a long day, better find that restaurant early in the evening. Because if you didn't phone ahead the day before, then you are sure to get a pretty angry head shake for showing up uninvited. Oh, and when you do show up to the Chinese restaurant without prior booking, and you get your table from an angry Chinese women (because you severely put her out for making her search if she could fit you into a table), don't be surprised by the fact that Chinese food can change a fair amount between countries. It does.
I did manage to find a hotel on the internet eventually for us to stay while in our beach town Scarborough: The Croft Hotel. As they say here, "It was brilliant!" The room said seaside view when I booked it, and it said it offered an English breakfast. The Croft didn't fall short of perfection on either of these points. That being said, I must still point out that we were more or less just strange visiting guest in someone's home that weekend. The owners lived in the converted apartment/basement. If we came in past 8:45pm, the creaking of the floors and stairs gave me the same fear I had when I was 13 and sneaking out to smoke. Don't get caught.
Here again we find ourselves at another interesting part about booking. You see, completing the booking isn't always enough. There would be no lower point in a day full of driving then finally arriving at your destination, (thinking to yourself, "If I see one more triple round-about today I'm driving straight through the damn thing...") and the door is locked up and the lights all out. Not a soul is home and guess what, you don't have a signal. So the solution is clear to the English, but I'd say I have never had to phone ahead a day or two to the hotel letting them know what time to expect me, otherwise they might have been out.
From our room we had a picturesque view of a bay with a castle on one side and farm land on the other, not'a one skyscraper. Castles...who says that? "Oh, yeah its got a great view to the castle!" "What's that...oh yeah, 3000 years old." Trails lead all over creation, from the beach walk, to the castles, from the century old church, back to the castle, and to the harbor in the adjacent bay. Lovely isn't a typical word in my vocabulary. In fact I can't recall the last time I did use it, but there is certainly no better way to describe this place and the time it afforded my wife and me.
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