we've barely even been touristing, we've just been relaxing
Sep. 11th, 2025 05:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_shoshannaWhew! Now ensconced in Hay-on-Wye for our pre-planned rest day between finishing the organized hike and spending a week on our own on the coast, first in Fishguard and then in Aberystwyth.
We had booked the cab driver who's been bringing our luggage from place to place (Sharon) to give us a lift partway along our second-to-last hike, from Knighton to Kington. She remarked that a lot of the hikers with our company do that, so she'd gotten curious and looked at their website, and boggled a bit at how strenuous the hikes are! She dropped us off at a beautiful meadow beside a stream, and off we went again.
I don't think I have anything in particular to say about the hike? It was fun and gorgeous, it didn't rain on us until the last half hour or so, we met lots of other hikers coming the other way (and often their dogs), including some our age or older who were backpacking all their luggage with them, wow. They did specify that they're staying in B&Bs, not camping, but even so that's much more than I'd want to carry, not to mention clamber up steep wooded hillsides in storm winds and hail with! Of course, they may be doing much gentler hikes. Anyway.
We walked through innumerable sheep fields, although possibly not any cattle fields that day. There's pork on every menu but we haven't seen any signs of pig farming, except that just after Sharon dropped us off, as we were getting ourselves oriented and booting up the navigation app, a truckload of pigs went along the road; we couldn't see them but we could hear them snorting.
The trail mostly parallels Offa's Dyke; sometimes it runs atop it, but apparently that has really contributed to its erosion. Still, Geoff did have me climb up on a scenic bit so that he could get a photo of what he wanted to call "hot dyke-on-Dyke action." I pointed out that I'm bi, not lesbian, and have never identified as a dyke, and he admitted my point but still wanted the picture. I made him promise not to tell that joke in public, and yet here I am, posting it!
(Today he took a picture of me by the River Wye that he has captioned "Wye Shoshanna? Wye not?" I told that, considering I named our wifi network "Because Fi," he could have that one for free.)
Food in general has been...fine. Most of the B&Bs offer the basic British full breakfast of an egg, a sausage, some beans and/or black pudding, some bacon, a grilled tomato half, and some toast, plus a self-serve spread of cold cereal and sometimes yogurt or something. There will also be a vegetarian version. (The first hotel we were in, in Bishop's Castle, had, among other things, whole almonds and dried apricots on the cereal-toppings bar, and we sneaked some for trail food. They also had a genuinely varied breakfast menu, and I got an excellent avocado toast with an egg. But it turns out that they spoiled us for the other places we've stayed.) Most of our dinners have been in the same hotel/pub/B&B we've been staying in; some were pre-reserved as part of the hike, presumably either as part of the deal between the hiking company and the hotel or just because the town was so small there weren't a lot of options so the hiking company wanted to ensure we'd be able to eat. (And indeed, most days we staggered in tired enough that we were very glad not to have to figure out what to do about dinner!) Anyway, over the days I've had a perfectly-decent-but-nothing-to-write-home-about pork roast in cider gravy; and a "sizzling chicken stir-fry" that turned out to be basically fajitas without the tortillas, except that the sauce was differently spiced; and something that was called a casserole but was much more like a loose stew. Geoff has had some good fish and chips and a nice pie and some tasty brisket and tagliatelle that was unfortunately mixed in with beans in a disappointing tomato sauce.
Two days ago was the day when, having had a shorter hike than usual because of getting a ride, we arrived at the hotel around 3:30 instead of collapsing through the door at 5:30, and the front entrance let us right into the bar, and on the end of the bar right in front of us as we came in was a glass cake stand displaying gorgeous wedges of Victoria slice. And I had a sudden craving. Geoff always has a pint of beer with dinner, and I often have a half; sometimes I haven't felt up to alcohol at all, especially our jetlagged first night, and once for a change I tried a local cider, but although I liked my initial taste of it it shrank on me (the opposite of "it grew on me") over dinner and by the end I found it nastily sour. But somehow as we arrived that afternoon I absolutely craved a big glass of rich red wine and a wedge of cake. So I had them! A made-that-morning Victoria slice, and a delicious fruity merlot that wouldn't be too tart next to it, and I had a very cozy happy slightly tipsy afternoon! And then that evening we had the best dinner we've had so far, one of the best meals in years. Their menu offered both a minted lamb shank and a hoisin roast duck, and we got them both and split them, and they were both amazing.
We'd told Sharon we'd want a lift partway on the next day as well, since the final hike, as planned, involved 830 meters of cumulative uphill, whereas the shortened option was only 510. But then we looked again at the distance; the full hike is 25 km/15½ miles, which is ridiculously more than we can do in a day, and we belatedly registered that even the shortened version was 17 km/10½ miles, which would still be quite a long day for us. And we checked the weather forecast that evening, and it was for wind and thundershowers all the next day; and when we checked again in the morning it had got even worse. And so we said fuck this, we've paid our dues, and called Sharon first thing in the morning to ask if she could just bring us all the way to Hay-on-Wye along with our luggage, and she said of course. Phew. We had pleasant conversation as we drove along; she said it was nice to actually meet some of the hikers whose bags she's always shifting! Her husband's a taxi driver as well -- I get the feeling that "Knighton Taxi" the company is just the two of them -- and their son drives a timber lorry for his father-in-law's company.
She also confirmed what we'd heard elsewhere: that it had been incredibly dry until this week, and the rain was desperately needed. Farmers have already been feeding their stock winter feed, because there's been nothing for them in the fields. So I don't begrudge the rain (as
rydra_wong quite correctly commented, we are experiencing Authentic British Weather), although it is, er, personally inconvenient. Thank goodness my passport seems to have safely dried out!Our B&B here, called "Rest for the Tired," is yet another centuries-old building; we're on the top floor/attic in what's basically a little suite, with a door leading to a little entrance hall with our bedroom on one side and our bathroom on another. All the beams and doorways are so low that Geoff has to be careful not to bang his head, and even I have to take the same care when coming down the stairs from our suite. As in most of the places we've stayed, there's just a shower stall, no tub, and this is the second place where the shower has an on-demand water heater with a separate, unmarked power supply that you have to know to look for and turn on before it will produce any water. At the first place Geoff, who had never seen that setup before, thought the shower was broken, but I showed him how it worked, having remembered it from decades-ago visits to the UK and having noticed an otherwise inexplicable pull cord in the bathroom. Here, we had seen a mysteriously unlabeled and rather intimidating red switch high up on the wall of our little hallway, outside the bathroom, and hadn't investigated because it looked, well, mysterious and official, like flicking it might cut off the house's power or something. But this morning I got up to take a shower while Geoff was still in bed, and when the on-demand water heater had no power light and did not respond to its On button, I investigated the mysterious switch with the help of standing on tippy toes and shining a flashlight on it, by which I could see that, whatever it was, it was set to Off. So I figured it was worth a try and switched it to On, whereupon the power light came on on the water heater and I was able to have a shower.
It's a functional but minimal shower stall, a big bathroom with zero counter or storage space anywhere near the pedestal sink but a huge counter and cabinet all the way on the other side of the room, and a toilet that only flushes if you pump the handle juuuust right, and then the plumbing shrieks and moans for a couple of minutes as it refills. And there's a nasty ammonia/cat pee smell in the back corner of the cabinet, under the sloping roof. Also it got quite chilly last evening, and although there are wall radiators in both the bedroom and the bathroom, they were ice cold. (And the bedroom window can't shut fully, because the latch mechanism is old and misaligned, and the wood of the window frame is rotted.) I googled to see if there might be any way to turn the radiators on ourselves, and got helpful web pages saying essentially, "It's easy to adjust these old-fashioned steam radiators! All you need is a pair of pliers, a wire, a needle, a towel and bucket, and access to the boiler!" So I eventually texted our host, an eighty-year-old woman named Mary.
Backtrack a moment: we had of course arrived hours earlier than expected, because we'd skipped the hike. The B&B building was unlocked but unstaffed; Sharon just heaved our bags into the front hallway, as is standard procedure. We poked around inside but didn't see anyone. A note taped to the door said that for B&B info before 4:00, ask at the bookshop next door (actually most of the ground floor of the same building, the B&B just has a narrow front hall and a stairway up); after 4:00, phone Mary at [number]. It was a little after 10, but the bookshop wasn't open, so we phoned Mary, who answered in a very energetic old-woman voice and said her cleaner would be in momentarily to show us our room. We didn't get the cleaner's name but she is also an energetic old woman, and rather deaf, to judge from the loudness of her voice. Mary also arrived as we were settling in and we chatted for a while. I am so glad these days to be able to answer "Where are you from?" with "Canada"! I mentioned that from here we would be catching a bus to Hereford, and she burst out that she was so glad I'd said it properly, "not like the awful way the Americans say it." Now I'm totally paranoid about saying it wrong!
Anyway, I texted Mary about getting some heat instead of phoning because it was almost seven pm at that point and I think of texts as much less intrusive than phone calls, especially at odd hours. But she didn't respond, so I texted her again at eight, and again she didn't respond; but at eight-thirty we found that the radiators had started putting out some heat: not much, but enough that I wasn't almost shivering any more. I texted once more just to say that everything was okay now. And then she phoned me at almost nine, not seeming to have read the texts but opening with "You called Rest for the Tired?" as though she were returning a missed call. I explained and we said goodnight, and then thirty seconds later she phoned back, returning the second text/call, not realizing I was the same person she'd just talked to. I had also initially texted Sharon, the taxi driver, to give her as much notice as possible that we wanted to change plans without interrupting her likely breakfast time, and then phoned when I hadn't heard back and it had reached a more reasonable hour, and she hadn't indicated she'd ever seen it. Maybe people here don't text routinely, the way people back home do?
Hay-on-Wye is famous for its bookstores, of which there are eighty gazillion, or possibly somewhere around 25-30. Mostly they're amazing warrens of used books numbering in the thousands, and if I ever read on paper any more I would probably be in heaven. They're a big reason Geoff wanted to spend an extra day here, but I'm already carrying two books he brought with him that don't fit in his pack, and if he wants to buy anything here he's going to have to have them ship it home. We wandered around town a bit yesterday and poked around several of them, but didn't do more than lightly browse. We also looked through the (much smaller, and new books rather than used) queer bookstore, delightfully named Gay on Wye, where I had fun standing in front of the romance and sf sections going "That author came out of fandom, and so did she, and so did she..."
COVID-related commentary
We're not masking in our hotels/B&Bs, or at meals; we ate our very first dinner outside, but since then outdoor eating hasn't been feasible. And we've kind of let slide masking in shops, even when we could, partly because they often have their doors standing open. We haven't seen a single other person masking, although no one has been weird about it when we were. But being indoors unmasked when it's not necessary has been making me a bit uncomfortable (although we are using an antiviral nasal spray, for whatever good it may do), so I remarked on it to Geoff yesterday and he agreed that we would go back to masking when feasible. And the very next shop we went into, which was Gay on Wye, as we were just leaving after looking around for a while, pondering souvenirs and gifts, spotting fan authors gone pro, etc., I heard the guy at the register telling a customer/friend, "I had COVID last week, and it's left me with walking pneumonia."And I just. I mean. Brother, for your own sake you should be home in bed, not working, but I don't know if you get sick time, I don't know if you're broke, I don't know if there's anyone else to mind the shop, I don't know your life. But if you had COVID "last week" you are plausibly still contagious with it, plus the pneumonia, and you're not even masking? SURE AM GLAD WE WERE. That definitely reaffirmed to me that we should go back to being more careful, jesus.
We had dinner last night at a pub next door called the Three Tuns, in a building that dates back to the sixteenth century. Geoff had the decent but ultimately somewhat disappointing aforementioned brisket tagliatelle, and I had an excellent pizza with hot salami and nduja and chili oil. We looked for other options for tonight, but everything we found nearby was either lunch-only (most of the restaurants in town), or disproportionately pricy, or basically a sports bar, or in one case had a series of terrifyingly bad Tripadvisor reviews within the last few months, so we're just going back there tonight; it's decent and convenient.
Today was the weekly town market! So after we made the mistake of having breakfast at our B&B -- I mean, it was fine, it was the usual "full English breakfast" except without beans because Mary despises them, it's just that that meant we were full when we went to the market -- we went to browse the market! Lots of fantastic breads and pastries, lots of veg and meat, a cheesemonger with it must have been at least thirty kinds of cheese, lots of pies, lots of jams and preserves, lots of clothes, plus everything from handmade soaps to jewelry to beautifully carved wooden canes. We admired many many things, and then decided to stock ourselves for a picnic lunch on a riverside walk. Geoff got a chicken, gammon, and jalapeno pie, and also a chocolate almond croissant (filled with almond paste and covered with sliced almonds, and then covered on top of that with chocolate and chocolate chips); I got a ciabatta roll and a small wedge of a cheese called Ticklemore that was described (I took a picture of the little display sign) as "mild, delicate cheese with a firm, slightly crumbly texture; citrus, grass, and earthy notes," and also a peach. Then we stopped back at the B&B to fill a water bottle and set out for the riverside.
It was almost strange to be setting out on a gentle stroll, with no time pressure, no expectation of strenuousness, and no intention of being out more than a couple of hours! We sauntered along the wooded riverside path, occasionally seeing the river between the trees (once seeing what may have been a heron) and also seeing some really skillful life-size carvings in tree trunks and stumps: a fox carved sitting on a stump, so realistic that for the first split second we thought it might be real; an owl atop another tall trunk and another owl peering out of a hole; and a bird of prey in mid-flight, depicted as just skimming with its talons the tree trunk it had been carved out of.
Eventually the path opened up into a large meadow, and we took advantage of a sunny interval to sit on a conveniently placed bench, looking out across the meadow and river, and eat. My cheese was delicious; Geoff's croissant was ridiculously over the top but also delicious in its own way. So restful! So civilized! So not being hailed on! Although it did rain, briefly but torrentially, on our way home; we just sheltered under a tree in the lee of a church wall for ten or fifteen minutes until it passed. And then we came back to the B&B to lounge about, and blog, and also we need to repack our bags because, being here for a whole two consecutive nights, we have somehow let them explode all over the room, and tomorrow morning we have to haul our own luggage for the first time in almost a week, onto a bus and then a train to our next stop, the coastal town of Fishguard.
We did have a fun conversation with Mary over breakfast this morning. She checked that we'd eventually been warm enough last night, and told us that when she was little, her family lived in an old castle -- until the roof fell in when she was five, and then they moved to what they called the mini-mansion, what had originally been the dower house or similarly associated building, I forget exactly what she said; it had had only twenty-six rooms(!), but they only used a small part of the house. And it was always cold; there was a fireplace at each end of the house, but unless they had company there was only ever a fire in one of them -- "and no more logs on the fire after nine pm!" her grandmother would bark. The kids slept in a huge old iron bedstead, two at one end and two at the other, heads in different directions, under layers and layers of quilts. The place got much warmer after her family eventually had the front door replaced and the whole front sill rebuilt; the old door had broken and rotted through in holes. And they eventually replaced the old, old window glass and crumbling window frames with new frames and triple-pane insulated windows. But when she was a child...wow. And, I mean, if she's eighty or so (we didn't ask, but she mentioned that her husband is 88), that was in the 1950s -- that's not so long ago!
(It occurs to me now that it did not occur to me then to ask about the plumbing in her childhood home. Now I'm curious!)
She also told more stories of terrible American tourists she's encountered: people who were rude or demanding. She tends to trail off a little and leave things to implication rather than being brutally specific, but she had a great deal to say about the American woman who complained vociferously that there was no refrigerator in her room ("This is a B&B. If you want a refrigerator, go to a hotel") and then couldn't find her boots and accused Mary's husband of stealing them. "Are you sure you didn't pack them in your bag?" asked Mary; "you did arrive here by taxi, not on foot." "Of course I didn't pack them," snapped the woman, "do you think I'm stupid?" "Well, let me help you look," said Mary, upended the woman's bag and dumped everything out, and lo, there were her boots. "I think you owe me an apology," said Mary, but she didn't get one. There were more stories about that woman, too; but apparently her traveling companion was lovely, sent Mary a beautiful little painting she'd done from a photo she'd taken of the B&B (Mary showed it to us), and still sends her Christmas cards! The two women hadn't even known each other before deciding to travel together.
Now I need to wrap this up and do a little packing before we go to dinner!
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