If you are thinking of traveling abroad it would be wise to read the following, or better yet write it down. Your bank account will thank you.
The tribal elders have trod these paths before, and when it comes to vacationing our combined wisdom is this:
“Bring half as many clothes as you think you’ll need, and twice as much money.”
Especially now, and definitely in England, where a dollar stretches like a piece of angle iron. British merchants look at dollars as if they were scraps of litter you found on the sidewalk. They will be happier trading their overpriced goods for your dirty socks. They will not take your filthy money.
Worry not, reader and fellow citizen, because there are ATMs along that same littered sidewalk, and their silent swindling will happily provide you with several Pounds Sterling in exchange for your weekly salary. That should be enough to get you into tomorrow.
We are staying at a London hotel, the St. James, and it’s a dandy. We are able to afford it only because wife Trophy called Expedia, impersonated a Trump niece and got the Family and Friends Discount.
Expensive? The St. James hotel hosts a morning breakfast priced at an intimidating 60 monetary units each, which translates to about $80 (US dollars) per person. So a morning buffet at $160 for cornflakes and stewed prunes is roughly the quality equivalent of the free breakfast buffet at a Holiday Inn outside Redding.
Trophy had granola (no extra charge for the quarter-cup milk) some chopped fruit and coffee. I had the fruit, a croissant a little bigger than my thumb with a complimentary pat of butter, and a couple strips of “bacon” that wasn’t.
The one-percenters lodging here and dining in the same elegant hotel facilities as us Ukiahans, also dress like Ukiahans when dandied up for a wedding or funeral.
Fellow guests were outfitted like they’d spent the early morning hours playing rugby or trimming their precious roses, or Ukiahans who’d spent the morning pruning their crop of star thistle.
The only people appropriately dressed were hotel staff in crisp white shirts, sharply creased black trousers and neatly trimmed hairdos. Take that, Left Coast Fishery!
Much later, we had dinner in an ancient British pub and I finally had the chance to watch a solid hour of Cricket, a local foreign game I’ve always assumed was an immature version of baseball. You know, a guy throws the ball, another guy whacks it with a bat and some other guys randomly loiter about. White uniforms and all that sort, right matey?
Hardly. I studied the TV screen intently and for a long time, and it never made any sense. Cricket is to Baseball what Futbol is to Football.
I couldn’t understand it so I won’t try to explain it. The only thing we recognized was when a camera zeroed in on a spectator clearly enjoying himself: Mick Jagger.
We’d been warned about the heat wave that would be sizzling through England during the weeks of early August, but “blistering temperatures” in Great Britain simply means it isn’t raining. On the hottest day Trophy went out with two layers of sweater, a coat, and a scarf around her neck. And gloves.
Instead of being warned of a nonexistent heat wave I wish there’d been notification about the semi-scandalous coffee in England. If you aren’t careful “coffee” is routinely defined as instant: a cup of warm water with brown granules stirred in.
So I’m back to Guinness Stout for breakfast.
We had haphazard plans to meet up with Jim Mastin and his modest posse, but hopes were dashed on the second day by divergent travel plans. That is, until those plans were clarified and it turns out that he and we will bump into each other in a coastal Cornwall town called Tintagel.
Tintagel is so small it isn’t on a map but is probably on google. I call our potential meet-up an astonishing coincidence but Trophy shrugged it off as “typical Ukiah.”
We’re taking a taxi to Tintagel and will probably see Jim & Co., hitchhiking along the road.
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