Arduinna

Back in the Before Times, Geoff and I tried to take a trip every year. Then COVID hit, and we haven’t done any significant travel in six years. (I mean, that was New Zealand, so if anything was going to have to last us six years, that would be it.) But it’s six years later, we’ve had ten vax shots each, and tomorrow we are leaving for Wales!

travel blather herein

I am, of course, still paranoid about getting ill.

But I have a strategy, because I perseverate a bit on these things

We plan to mask as much as possible in public indoor space, just as we do at home; on my last trip to visit friends I perfected the eating-indoors-in-public method of

1. inhale
2. hold breath
3. unmask
4. take bite
5. replace mask
6. exhale
7. chew and swallow

and while it’s troublesome, on the other hand it seems to have worked. So that’s the plan for the plane flight and long UK train rides. Plus I have a mask with a SIP valve, so I can drink with it on. We’re hoping that we’ll be able to eat many meals outside, but we’ve reached the point of being okay with it if we can’t sometimes on this trip. (I mean, I say that now. I warned Geoff that he’ll have to expect that I’ll freak out a couple of times, that’s just part of the process. I have spent six years deliberately inculcating a phobia in myself! It took me a long time to get over the phobia of semen I deliberately inculcated in myself in the mid-1980s, too, but hey, I have never had either HIV or COVID, so I’m okay with harnessing neurosis, it works for me.)

Also I keep reminding myself of this post that I made long before COVID was a thing; it’s not like it’s the only risk involved in travel!

We’re doing a weeklong hiking trip with a company we’ve traveled with several times before, the kind where they move your luggage from B&B to B&B and you walk all day with a daypack and a lunch. (And hiking poles and raingear and their awesome GPS navigation app.) We love them; in fact, in March 2020 we’d already paid a deposit for a trip that summer, which we never got to take! (They refunded us, of course.) Their system is efficient and clear, we love the places they offer to stay and the routes they have us take, which are sometimes delightfully off the beaten track and are described wonderfully. “Watch out for the muddy bit”; “turn right just past the house with a chicken mural”; “there’s a great spot for a picnic lunch just over the rise”; and so on. Also I have no idea what kind of customer-management software they’ve got on the back end, but in arranging the trip we’ve corresponded with a number of different people, and every single one has been fully up to speed with what we’re doing, what our few special requests are, exactly when and how we’re arriving at the start and departing from the end, and so on. Nobody who has ever navigated customer service hell will take that for granted. And it doesn’t hurt that they’re the most reasonably priced such company I’ve ever found, in the admittedly limited comparison shopping I’ve done.

This walk is quite challenging, and we’re a bit uncertain we can actually do it! They tell you the cumulative uphill distance for each day’s walk, which is sometimes a lot (the worst day has an 820-meter total rise), and some of the days’ hikes are expected to take as much as eight hours, counting rest breaks. If we punk out, though, we can generally arrange to ride with our luggage to the next stop instead of walking to it, and they always make clear when there’s a local bus available, or a way to cut off a loop, or some other shortening option. Geoff and I have both been exercising pretty hard to get in shape for this, but I do think I could have done more.

We leave tomorrow: a friend will give us a ride to the train station, we take a train to Montreal, and then hopefully a free shuttle bus to the airport, but I’ve heard stories that the shuttle is often late or overfull. We can always take a cab, but if the weather is good -- the forecast has been iffy, but right now it looks okay -- we might just walk it. It’s only about half an hour, and it will be the only exercise we get for a couple of days, so the prospect has some appeal! But man, I miss living a twelve-minute drive from a major airport so much.

After we finish that week of heavy hiking, we spend two full days (three nights) in a pair of small coastal towns called Fishguard and Goodwick, where the plan is to spend one day rambling along the coastline, which is supposed to be gorgeous, and the other sea kayaking! There we’re staying on a smallholding that rents out one (1) bedroom as a B&B, and the couple who run it have been incredibly friendly and helpful with recommending activities and restaurants, offering rides (rural public transit is pretty thin on the ground), and so on; also their breakfasts sound amazing, and that’s a thing we always look for when choosing B&Bs! I’m bringing them a half-liter of local maple syrup as a thank-you gift; I don’t generally do that, since it is a business relationship, we exchange currency for goods and services, but they’ve really gone above and beyond, and I mean, they’re only barely a business.

Then we have another three nights in Aberystwyth, and I have very little idea what exactly we’ll do there other than collapse, except that the National Library of Wales is there and I want to see what exhibits they have on, and there’s a scenic railway that might be worth checking out. Then one day on the outskirts of London, in a place chosen only because we can catch a coach from there direct to Heathrow the next morning. We’ll land in Montreal in the evening and spend the night in an airport hotel, before catching a train home the next day.

I am the main planner of our trips; Geoff calls me Logistics Girl. Which is fine with me, because I enjoy it, I’m good at it, and when I leave bits for him to do I always want to micromanage anyway, which is stressful for everyone. (But, I mean. I asked him to manage our getting to and from Montreal, while I took primary responsibility for everything on the actual trip; managing the domestic side included deciding whether and how to see his family there and/or ask them for airport rides and/or an overnight stay, and I didn’t want to be the person making those decisions. And he said sure, and absolutely understood that that should be his job. And then he sent me essentially a Google search link for airport hotels and asked which one I’d prefer. And I was like, which part of “I want you to do the work of researching options, weighing them, and choosing the best” did you not understand? I can do a damn Google search myself! I mean, I understand that he wants to be sure that I’m happy with the final choice, and I appreciate that, but then he can do what I do, which is narrow options down and present my top two or three choices, with a quick overview of the pros and cons of each, for him to consider.)

ANYWAY. He did do that after I cranked at him. And in fairness, I've found that I’m quite out of practice at logisticking, myself! Trying to track everything and figure out infinite options and piece together itineraries was unexpectedly stressful: where do we want to go, how will we get there, which railcard is our best option and how do we get it, is the layover time we have a reasonable amount of time in which to navigate this specific station, and on and on. Also so much has changed in the last six years; I never used to have to download umpteen transit apps, but on the other hand it's way easier and cheaper to get a foreign SIM than it used to be. And there has been a ridiculous pile-up of last-minute craziness:

I got a new orthotic this summer, and that meant that my hiking boots didn’t fit, so I needed new boots. Also, usually when you have a prescription orthotic you take the original insole out of the shoe or boot to fit the new one in, but I didn’t want to do that, because that’s where a lot of the padding is, and with the amount of walking I’m going to be doing I did not want to be doing it only on the unpadded sole and the fairly hard orthotic. So I was looking for boots that could fit both. I ended up buying three pairs in a week! First I went shopping and found a good enough pair; not great, but they were there and the store had a generous return policy, so I bought them as a stopgap and kept looking. Then in another store I found a fabulous pair that fit beautifully, but the pair in the store was damaged and they couldn’t get me another one, because the style was discontinued and remaindered. So I searched for it online and found what seemed to be the only pair of women’s 10s left in Canada, at massive discount because discontinued and remaindered, and ordered them with rush shipping -- and when they arrived they didn’t fit, because it turned out the salesman had given me a pair of men’s 10s to try on, instead of the women’s 10s I’d asked for. No wonder there was room for both insoles! And there wasn’t another men’s 10 of that brand and style to be found. But with that info I went back and tried on some other men’s 10s and found a really good pair of Merrell’s, a brand I’ve always had good luck with. The first pair of new boots got returned; the second pair, being discontinued and remaindered, were final sale, but they turned out to fit a friend who also needed new boots; and my old pair, which are still in decent shape, went into the thrift-shop-donation pile.

So that was one bit of craziness. Our long-delayed front porch project is finally going to begin construction while we’re away, which means we had to find somewhere to leave the car because our driveway will have a dumpster in it for construction waste and we’re not allowed to leave the car on the street; but fortunately a house across the way is empty and for sale, and the owner said we can park in his driveway. I started developing a stye like the one I had in the spring that got so bad I needed antibiotic ointment; but happily I still had half a tube of ointment left so I prescribed myself another round of it plus all the hot compresses I could manage, because I did not want to be dealing with an eye infection in rural Wales! I discovered by the merest fluke of luck that a bus service we're relying on was canceled as of Sept. 1, but I managed to find the replacement service, run by a different company, that is mentioned on the new company's Facebook page and nowhere else including not on their website or on any of the travel planning sites, and confirm that we can still make the train we're taking it to. The new bus leaves fifteen minutes earlier than the old bus, so if I hadn't stumbled across that notice we'd probably have been screwed. And then a few days ago I somehow managed to wrench my knee rolling over in bed, I don't even know. But although it hurt like fuck for a few minutes, by the next day it was just a vague ache, and the day after that it was fine. Thank god. I mean, a week before we leave? Argh.

Anyway, my do-before-leaving list has seventy items on it and just over sixty of them are now crossed off; and my packing list has sixty items on it and fifty of them are crossed off -- and many of the rest are things I plan to wear on the plane rather than pack.

All that said, though -- and it’s a lot to say! -- I’m really looking forward to this. Traveling together used to be one of Geoff’s and my great pleasures, and not being able to do it has been one of the great losses of COVID. I want to see amazing sights and eat amazing food and encounter new people. I want to hear Welsh! I want to exhaust myself and feel accomplished about having done so! I want to share all of the above with Geoff!

I also hope to blog the trip here, as much as I can. Stay tuned. But now I gotta go polish off a couple more of those to-dos...

This past Saturday was the day that four thousand university students arrived in town, making it an excellent day to not be in town! Happily, there's an annual garlic festival on that day, about half an hour north of here, so just as we did last year, Geoff and I headed on up.

it's basically a small farmer's market, only focusing on garlic. I hadn't realized, before we went the first time, that there were that many varieties of garlic! I mean, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, I'd just never really thought about it. In any case, my palate is not refined enough to bother about the subtle differences in taste among them: slightly sharper, slightly sweeter, slightly earthier, and so on. Also some are better keepers, but I don't try to store garlic for months, I just buy less of it more often, because I'm not farming it. But it's very fun to look around!

Although it's focused on garlic, there's other things on sale as well. Many of the garlic farmers bring a few punnets of veggies as well, and there's a lot of canned and pickled veg for sale. A beekeeper comes with a hive in a glass frame, so it's fun to watch the bees and look for the queen (she's always smaller than I expect her to be). We bought some honey from him last year, which was very good. There's also a soapmaker, and a couple of woodworkers; the friend we went with this year bought a beautiful turned elm bowl from one of them, and also a bud vase of . . . chestnut, I think? a darker wood, anyway, and then he gave her a second bud vase for free! One or two people were selling various knitted things, and for some reason there's also somebody selling bamboo sheet sets.

I tried black garlic, which I would think would be very much the sort of thing I like, and yet I did not like it. One dealer sells honey-garlic tarts, which Geoff tried last year and rather liked, and got another one this year to munch on, but I think they're vile. (And there's not a lot of food I think that about!) On the other hand, someone was selling jars of candied jalapeno slices, which have nothing in particular to do with garlic except I imagine they would go well with garlic; they're not candied in the sense of being entirely sugar-coated and sticky, they're more a very sweet (and spicy) pickle? We tasted them (all the dealers give out samples, because they're not dumb) and they were delicious. I asked the seller what he does with them, and he said they were great on nachos and grilled cheese sandwiches, and I said, "I guess I'm making nachos this week!" and bought a jar. I did indeed make nachos the next night, and they were indeed fantastic. Next I'll try them on on barbecue chicken pizza...and they look pretty easy to make as a refrigerator pickle, so I'll be looking up some recipes!

Yesterday a friend and I went to see Pride, the 2014 movie about the queer support of the 1984 miners' strike in Britain. I'd heard wonderful things about it but never seen it, and the local film society had organized a showing for Labor Day, so off we went!

It was indeed excellent, really powerful and moving. I started getting chills at the opening music, and my friend and I both wept through parts of it. I hadn't thought about the juxtaposition of the AIDS crisis and the miners' crisis, but omg, I was flashing back to what it was like in the late 80s (even for me, and I'm not claiming to have been heavily involved in queer activism or at the heart of the catastrophe or anything. But I was queer, and I did live through that period, and I had friends who didn't...) I thought the movie did a great job of integrating the two ongoing concerns, especially with Mark's encounter with his friend at the club; that was a heartbreaking moment. The acting was spectacular, as was some of the scenery.

Thinking about the film the next day, I'm a little dissatisfied with how much of the story was simplified for the movie: we see so little of what LGSM actually did that the arrival of 5–10(?) busloads of miners at the 1985 Pride march seems wildly disproportionate. They're coming from places and union locals that we never saw LGSM interacting with or supporting. I wanted to see more about the lesbian-only group. Also, I disliked how Joe apparently teleported from London to Wales on his own just for the sake of a confrontation between him and Mark; I found that implausible even while watching it.

But the movie has prompted me to go look up some of the actual history, so I call that a win! And I really enjoyed it. Also I've watched a bunch of Bronski Beat videos today...