Conwy

I’m back home now after a great travel season. On the road for four months of the last five, I marvel at the experiences I enjoyed and am thankful for the work I was able to accomplish. I did my share to update our various guidebooks (with work in Italy, Hungary, Prague, Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Spain, and England) and produced the last three shows of our new series (Basque, North Spain, Helsinki/Tallinn), which debuts nationally next month.

Settling back into my office, I look ahead at an exhilarating year with my staff, designing our new content into usable material to help Americans travel smarter than ever.

I have a few random scraps in my blog notes file that must get their day in the sun:

In Vienna, if you die in the hospital you are automatically an organ donor. It’s like a wrecking yard of human bodies.

In Conwy in North Wales, the fisherman’s harbor was fixed up by EU money, but EU regulations require that fish must be transported in refrigerated trucks. Those trucks couldn’t fit through the gate to the new harbor, so they set up shop in the next town. Now Conwy has a fine fisherman’s harbor…with no fishermen.

Windsor, which is just under the landing path of planes coming into London’s Heathrow Airport, is a delightful town at night. It has inexpensive B&Bs (compared to London prices), a wonderful pedestrian zone along the Thames River and in the shadow of the hulking Windsor Castle, and an enticing array of small restaurants. Windsor gave me a peaceful and charming last night in England before flying out.

I am a sucker for old, historic, black-and-white photos. Many small and charming towns have no museums or organized way to let people know what they were like a century ago. But a few hotel lobbies, pubs, and cafés collect and display old photos, serving as a small history gallery for visitors. While it may sound weird, I find this is a plus when I consider recommending a place.

If this offends you, so will Blackpool.
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Blackpool daze.
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Backstage with Christopher, aka “Hope.”
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For silly and personal reasons (which I won’t share), I included Blackpool in Europe’s Top 20 Destinations in the special edition Smithsonian magazine we recently produced with the wonderful people on that staff. Visiting Blackpool last month, I was hoping it would charm me in the gut-bomb, white-trash way only Blackpool can. But the place depressed me. Two men greeted me by showing me their new tattoos that still made their butt cheeks all red. And it went downhill from there.

I desperately needed a couple of good B&Bs to recommend in my Blackpool chapter. I found a great one, but the woman who runs it was furious at me for my industrial espionage methods of research. (I drop in and say I need a room. They show me a couple as if I’m a prospective customer. Then, once I’ve seen how they treat travelers without knowing who I am, I tell them I don’t really need a room and that I’m researching for a guidebook.) She just stopped talking with me, so I couldn’t complete my research interview to get the information on the hotel I needed to write up a new listing. It was strange to be essentially thrown out of a hotel that I’ll still write up and recommend and send lots of business to in the coming year via my guidebook.

Blackpool is a study in people watching. For a long time I observed a woman, in a carnival-like trance, digging dreamily into her piggy bank, dropping in coin after coin in hopes of winning a tiny teddy bear.

The people of Blackpool are so impressed by the goofy tableaux that line their main drag (big, garish, cartoon-like installations that are strewn with little electric lights). I can’t imagine that they were impressive, even back in the 1960s when they were set up. But then I went to the Funny Girls drag show, had a wonderful time, met one of the performers — a gorgeous Filipino named Christopher — who “absolutely loves my show.” And I remembered what Blackpool was all about: unbridled, unpretentious, lowbrow fun.

As I say in my guidebook, the Cumbrian Lake District in North England is beautiful, but its beauty is even more striking when coming from crass Blackpool. Keswick is my slam-dunk favorite home base for exploring the Lake District. Intending to freshen up my hotel and B&B listings, I spent a morning visiting new places. I toured a great guesthouse, thinking I was incognito. When I told Gillian (who ran the place) who I was, she said, “You’re not going to insult my carpet, are you?” Startled and confused, I asked what brought on that random comment. She said that her friend was in my book, and I described her place as “good in spite of the tired, kitschy carpet,” and she considered that insulting. It was funny to me because I didn’t even think she knew who I was, much less how I described the carpet in a competing B&B.

Now that I’m home, people ask where I’m heading next. I have no idea. While I’ve yet to give it a thought, I know I’ll spend next April, May, July, and August in Europe. But right now, I do know that until then, I’ll be home. I’ll be enjoying the challenges and rewards of my work and becoming something more than a temporary local — with gusto.

As in the States, people in Britain have been trained by the media to talk about “The Crisis.” For 10 days, all I saw was Britain at play. But the metabolism of tourism is certainly down. It’s sad to see lively cultural events like the medieval folk banquet in Ruthin (North Wales) and the sheep shows (Ewe-phoria in North Wales and the Cockermouth Lakeland Sheep and Sheepdog show near Keswick) fall on hard times. All three were major sights in my guidebook. And now all three are gone or dramatically reduced.

For 20 years, I’ve built my North Wales coverage in part around the medieval banquet at Ruthin Castle. But they recently reduced the schedule to just two a month, making it more difficult for my readers to take part in the festivities. Driving into Ruthin, I intended to cut the town entirely from my guidebook. I was on edge, moody, as if I was about to commit a violent act. I was mad that the town would drop the one thing that put it on travelers’ map. I was going to kill it.

But as soon as I entered my good old Ruthin — and saw the funky half-timbered pubs, the humble fountain, the cheap but beloved WWI monument, the home where Cynthia Lennon lived after John left her, the church with the never-locked wrought-iron gate where everything is in Welsh, and the views down cobbled lanes leading directly into forested hills — I lost my nerve and knew I’d have to keep it in my book. Even with the reduced schedule of the banquet — the wenches playing harps, the noble lord telling Irish jokes, and the rotund voices of Welshmen and -women raising the rafters of the castle dining hall to the delight of tourists from around the world — I couldn’t cut Ruthin entirely. I scaled my coverage down, but kept the city.

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The new attraction for me — perhaps a sign of the times — was not the medieval folk banquet, but the panache that Christopher and Gavin (a big-city couple) have brought their adopted hometown with their artful guesthouse and restaurant. They’re gay, artsy, and flamboyant — a little dicey when they first came to this rural town. But within a couple of years, they and their restaurant were established. In fact, Gavin was actually mayor (actually, “president of the town council”). Today when locals want the best meal in town, they go to the Manorhaus, and are served by Gavin and Christopher.

Culture doesn’t always hit you with a goofy stage show. Especially these days, you need to look harder to find culture in action. Anyone can point you to a great ruined castle or a fine restaurant. But how do we see the culture in action for today’s residents…not tourists? It’s tough. In Conwy (North Wales), I found it in a Bingo Palace. Here’s the new entry for my guidebook:

Conwy’s former cinema is now the Bingo Palace, where nearly every evening people who are very serious about their bingo gather. Visitors simply fill out a free membership card and buy in. Don’t show up after 19:15, because you can’t start late. As the woman calls numbers with her mesmerizing tune (“eight and seven…eighty-seven…all the twos…twenty-two, only five…number five”), intense old ladies who dress up to go play blot their numbers. The tension breaks each time someone calls, “Line!” It’s keyed in with a national game, so someone can really win big. Note: As posted, “If you bring your own teabag, you’ll still have to pay 40p” (joining the game costs Â£7-14 depending on the evening, Thu-Tue 18:00-22:00, closed Wed, across from Castle Hotel on High Street).

Conwy

Random Scraps

Economic Crisis in Britain? Bingo!