England #1 - the prelude; back to reality in The England Chronicles - May 2017

Since I’ve been back from England for, ummmmmm.....a month today, it’s about time I made an entry. Of course I’ve spent the last half hour trying to figure out why I can not get pictures from Flickr to post here anymore, and now I’m nearly out of time! Apparently I’m just going to have to use Facebook as my picture site. I’ve been having problems with posting from Flickr here for ages. It used to be easy, then they changed their setup for the millionth time. Simple Mind’s instructions are for back when it actually worked. SO if anyone uses Flickr to post pictures, let me know how on earth you’re doing it.

And let me know if you don’t see pictures- I have to set them to public on FB and am trying to remember to do that.

BUT, enough of that! We had SUCH A GREAT TIME. It was wonderful, and I have missed England terribly since I’ve been back. Shockingly enough, we had no disasters- at least not on the scale of the infamous Lost Passport Disaster from last trip. Of course there was the occasional glitch and blip and complication, but nothing to mar the trip - just fodder for amusing stories!

We spent the first week in Bodmin, Cornwall, at a weird little resort that was WAY out in the country - a bunch of little cabins and a fishing lake, and gorgeous scenery. It was actually a really nice place (ours was a weirdly large cabin- they also had A -frames that looked quite teeny from the outside). We had THREE bedrooms and three bathrooms, for just the two of us. Although Kim had led me to believe it wasn’t a timeshare, in reality… it was totally a timeshare. Kim did not want me to know it was a timeshare because she’s had a number of, shall we say, misadventures involving buying into timeshares and then not being able to use them and spending a blue fuck-ton of money on maintenance fees and then spending even more when she actually can use one because they apparently charge you for every breath you take when you’ve bought into a timeshare. Incidentally, Kim is not the sort of person who has such vast amounts of spare money lying around that she can afford to sling it at timeshares. Kim has NO spare money lying around, ever, and part of that is due to spending it on timeshares.

I’m saying “timeshares” like she’s had thousands of them. I know she’s got one she bought into years ago, which she could never get rid of (they sell for like ONE CENT on eBay– “sell” as in you still can’t sell them, even at a penny) and I keep thinking she had another one at some point. Her mom definitely had a couple of them, so I may be thinking of those. You supposedly can transfer your two weeks to other sites, which was a draw because her original one is in Orlando, and there’s not much to do in Orlando unless you want to go to Disney and spend another five million dollars a day. But I think the only time she actually got to transfer it was the first time we went to England and she used it for the canal boat near Nottingham that we stayed one week on. Because a canal boat was IT as far as getting anything anywhere in the UK, and we started hunting over six months in advance. Admittedly, the canal boat WAS fun to stay on, although all we did was spend four nights on it then drive down to Wiltshire and stay in motels for three more because no way were we taking it out after watching the demo and the DVD on operating canal boats and all the ways you could destroy them.

ANYHOW, you have to pay yearly maintenance fees and pay again for the week you’re using it (I think the canal boat was $700, AFTER the maintenance fees and the extra fee she had to pay to transfer the week somewhere besides Orlando… but maybe that was part of the $700. Who knows!) in addition to whatever you pay to begin with for a timeshare, and basically it’s a huge racket. SO Kim didn’t admit that her new vacation thing was actually a time share! She got it via being a government employee and supposedly the fees are small and manageable. I will say there were quite a few UK options and this place was very nice, and we booked it about six months ahead. So maybe this one isn’t a total rip off. I certainly enjoyed benefiting from it!

Wow, no wonder it takes me so long to do an entry - I certainly do get sidetracked.

The second week was at an AirBnB a little south of Bath, in the attractively-named Peasedown St John. And as nice as the resort was, I fell in loooooove with the AirbNb. (okay, couldn’t figure out if it’s AirBnB or AirbNb. It’s neither. It’s just Airbnb. I’ve been typing that wrong for years.) The woman who rents it out is an artist, and apparently lives there when she’s not renting it (oddly enough we never met her in person despite her giving the impression that she was close by; perhaps in the same row of houses. Weird! She was extremely responsive, though), as it was FULL of cool stuff. Old books everywhere, paintings everywhere (mostly hers but some from her kids and her dad) fun old furniture all painted and restored, stones and shells and flowers and I just wanted to move in and never leave. It was quite an odd contrast between the two places, one pleasant but kind of anonymous resort, and the other overloaded with personality.

So, the two weeks were very different- we were in totally different places, in both geography and lodging. We basically did not stop for two weeks, and saw a TON of stuff, but still didn’t see a fraction of what we’d hoped. Next time!! I have an Ulman City Maps to Go app on my phone and iPad, and you can mark places you want to see and take notes and make lists and it’s REALLY handy, and I marked so many places that it looks like I lost my mind. Oh, wait! I actually did post that on Facebook for Kim’s amusement before we left, telling her she’d better take a few more weeks off:

Hahahaha!!! Well, at least I’ll have it for next time. I do totally recommend this app, though. We saw a lot, and couldn’t have possibly done more than we did in two weeks.

OH, and driving was, bizarrely, a breeze! Well, maybe “a breeze” is overstating it, but I’d been a tiny bit nervous because although I’ve driven in England, it’s been seven years since the bulk of my driving experience. I didn’t drive a lot on our last trip - Baker B was so nervous about the teeny wrong-side-for-us-roads that he had to do all the driving himself. I didn’t find it difficult last time, though, and thought it was lots of fun once I got used to it. We got the car in London, and although it was a little, ummmmm, nerve-wracking trying to get to the M4 - we were very close to Heathrow but it wasn’t as straight a shot as the Enterprise we used the other two times, and we were having data issues with Google Maps – in that the idiotic international plan I paid for was ALREADY OUT OF DATA, so Kim ended up switching hers (the same thing - $40 for a much-more-minuscule-than-I-realized amount of data) to the pay as you go one which was $10 a day but we REALLY needed Google Maps so just split it. She did this as I was parked the wrong way in some random hotel’s loading area trying not to have a panic attack, but after that we were able to figure out where the hell the M4 was pretty easily. And I spent the next two weeks zipping around like a pro! I’d actually watched some YouTube roundabout videos as a refresher course, and read up on the road rules, which I’d definitely recommend. It was good to have several hours on the M4 to get used to it, but even that evening, when we were trying to find a pub in Bodmin and Google Maps was taking us ALL OVER THE UNIVERSE on the smallest teeniest narrowest back roads it could possibly find (I will note here that Google Maps hated us and wanted us dead, as she continued to demonstrate for the entire trip), I kept thinking, OMG! I should be terrified, but… this is FUN!!!!

Our little car was an adorable teeny Fiat. I adored it.

Wow, what a surprise, I’m out of time. And everyone reading is probably out of patience. I will leave with a couple of pictures of us having fun!

At the Roman Baths! I look a little weird- well, okay, a lot weird - but I kind of like it since I obviously have eyes in this picture. Generally my tiny eyes appear non-existent.

And me toasting our England - with my non-existent eyes and my very scraggly hair, but hey, who cares what you look like when you’re having this much fun!

To Be Continued!

Last updated June 21, 2017