(no subject)

[lady_t_220]

I am returned from my weekend in Wales. I am very, very tired. There were 'adventures', not all of them particularly good, but those were at least nothing to do with Wales and an awful lot to do with mechanical failure.

The failure being that we set off in the morning, and the engine overheated almost fatally before we even reached Stoke-On-Trent and we had to be towed home again. A lot of frantic flapping and pessimism and frayed tempers ensued (and that was just the adults... the kids were perfectly happy either way and rather enjoyed the ride in the tow-truck) and we set off again, in the evening, split over two different cars.
The boy's TomTom however got insanely confused and took us possibly the most impossible, rediculous, convoluted route humanly fucking possible, so we didn't actually get to our destination till 11:30 at night. And when I say convoluted, you know you've gone an out-of-the-way direction somewhere when you're weaving around Snowdonia in the dark and the rain and the fog on a road signposted as "The Scenic Route" on happy little touristy brown signs while the TomTom lies and tells you you're only 20 miles away... for an hour and a half.
Which was not so fun. On the other hand, at least we learned from this and got home substantially faster than we got there. (I'm not sure it would have been possible to get there slower.)

The weather was... kind of Welsh, by which I mean it rained 2 days out of the 3, but the one day it was sunny it was glorious, and that happened to be the day we visited Portmeirion. Which is just unspeakably gorgeous in every way possible and I would quite happily live there even though it's not a real village. There are an insane number of photos of it on my camera right now. At some point I'll do a big catch-up post, but flickr's being flaky so it'll have to wait.

Due to the weather there wasn't a huge amount of time spent on the beach, which was kind of a shame, but then it was a particularly odd beach. The sand was... disconcertingly black. It looks normal and sand-coloured on top, until you start digging. Because under about a half inch of yellow sand, there's black sand from the slate. So, so weird.
Also the beach is rediculously huge. By which I mean when the tide's out you have to walk the better part of a mile to actually make it to the water's edge. Honestly you have to walk a fair distance to get there even when the tide's in. We never did actually make it all the way to the sea. Genuinely, no matter how far you walk the sea never gets any closer. Great wind for kite flying but a weird, weird place.

Sadly we didn't have anywhere near enough time to do a lot of the things we would have liked. There's about a half a dozen castles and a roman spa and a steam railways and mountain railways and slate mines and copper mines and all manner of things. I could so easily have lost a fortnight there. So, so easily. It's on the list of places to go back to, with more time, more money and a less demented sat-nav.

Comments

[viewoftheworld.livejournal.com]

We refer to my ILs sat-nav as "blonde in a box" it gets flustered rather easily and keeps saying "Just a moment recalculating" In downtown Tampa it finally gave up and sulked didn't even say "just a moment" it just kept muttering "recalculating, recalculating, recalculating..."

[lady-t-220.livejournal.com]

It was the first time he'd used it and even though we had the postcode of the place we wanted to get to, it couldn't find it because the postcode coveres a rather large, but fairly sparsely populated, cluster of villages. Even with the name of the village it had a spasm about it. When we finally got there and it located itself at last, it turned out the reason the sat-nav couldn't find the village initially was because it has an entirely different name in Welsh and it was the Welsh name the sat-nav wanted rather than the English name provided on all the booking corespondence.
*facepalms*

[viewoftheworld.livejournal.com]

My parents tell people don't use a sat-nav here because they messed up the road names in the database what is really say yellow road is called brown road in the database but no the real brown isn't called yellow it's called green road and the real green road has a name no one that lives there has ever heard any road in the area called. So no matter what you put in it'll take you to the wrong place or tell you that the poor people on purple road don't exist... **Headdesk** So when I was helping them and getting the home health care people there I'd say "Call first and I'll meet you at the main road to lead you to the house." It was just to hard to explain all the names on the road signs don't match the sat-nav databases.

[lady-t-220.livejournal.com]

Yeah. When I was still dealing with the building thing for Mrs Boss, I don't think a single tradesman EVER found that place without calling me to get directions. Which is kind of funny cause it was slap in the centre of town in a really unmissable place, but the building numbers don't run sequentially. Odd numbers ran up one side of the street from top to bottom, and even numbers down the other side from bottom to top. So #56 was directly opposite #3. Sat Navs can't deal with this so they always ended up outside #55, half a mile away and intensely confused.

I did rather enjoy the specific "Your sat-nav is wrong" signs in Wales though.
Tiny little mountain track roads with a blue sign showing a truck under a satellite with a BIG RED X through it. They've had trouble with sat-navs sending trucks up impassable mountains and into lakes and things.