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No room at the inn
I have always been told "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail" so there was a plan... of sorts. Admetedly it wasn't a very good plan, or it would have been a good plan if it hadn't been the last bank holiday of the summer. It ran along the lines of a plan used during a previous road trip over a bank holiday a number of years ago of which I had great memories. The plan was:
Instead of number 3 there was "teh quest" for a room. The quest started in Llandudno, and what a quest it was. It may first appear that "The Queen of North Wales Resorts" is just that: a rather pleasant sea front with a peir and a promenade and rows upon rows of hotels and B+Bs ready to welcome tourists and visitors. Appearances are deceiving. This is in fact the human equivalent of an elephant's graveyard. It is a place where Faulty Towers is a fly on the wall documentary. We started our quest a the In hindsight turning down the offer to share a single bed may have been rather foolish and on reflection it may have been rather short sighted to not take advantage of the misunderstanding over the kind of vacancy we were enquiring after, yes we should have realised that when we were offered a job it would have meant a bed at the end of the shift but we were still optimistic then, the quest had only just begun. Some of the B+Bs and hotels were just plain cruel and chose not to display a no vacancy sign, leading us to witness common rooms filled to the brim with ancient residents awaiting death and nodding to the rythm of a hammond organ (appologies, the links on offer are as dull as the sound they produce) or a blaring stereo. A few of the receptionists were lovely and helpful though, one of them suggested the "less popular" back streets and wrote a few names down of places which still had vacancies when she was on her way to work. Unfortunately a few hours had passed since then and the rooms had found occupants in the mean time. The quest then took us to Chester, Wrexham, Liverpool and Stoke. Everywhere the same answer, no rooms, anywhere. Now the Frenchmobile has many qualities but not that of being a suitable place to sleep to adults so we kept driving. If anybody had told me that one day I would find myself overjoyed at the idea that there was a room available near the Birmingham NEC I would probably have laughed in their faces but now I know the power that the prospect of resting ones' head on fluffy pillows holds over me, honestly I could have danced a jig of joy if I knew how to dance the jig and had a dancing bone in my body. Birmingham? Lovely place, won't hear a bad word about it now. Can't have been that bad an experience I can already laugh about it, though I never did get to see the Devil's kitchen , maybe next time, if I can prove that I have booked somewhere, that there is no Hammond organ there, that the pillows are fluffy, that Basil Faulty is nowhere to be seen and that there is no lingering smell of mould and lavender.
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29.8.06 18:05 |
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