Greater Manchester - Poynton, Cheshire and Manchester Proper

18th August - the last full day of our trip.  Tomorrow we wake up and drive ourselves to the airport.

Today is devoted to Poynton, Stockport, Cheshire, England -- where my great-great aunt Amy ran an off-license (package store - liquor store) on Park Lane, and where my great-great uncle Billy and aunt Ethel lived.  I met Ethel, Billy and Amy back in 1988, and I stayed with Ethel and Billy during my month in Europe with my Nana and my cousin Jonathan.  Ethel, Billy and Amy were all childless and my Nana was an only child, so we have no living relatives left in England.

My dad's plan was simple -- try to find where the off-license was, and try to find Lindau -- which was Ethel and Bill's home for many years.

The roads to the tiny town of Poynton are equally tiny, and my dad was challenged by them -- judging the sides of the car and dealing with the oncoming traffic is stressful, even in a little Fiat!  We ended up driving up and down the same narrow road through the woods three times, trying to find Lindau.  Lindau's address didn't have a street number -- it was simply Lindau, Middlewood Road, Poynton.  A Google search today reveals that many of the homes on Middlewood Road still lack street numbers, though digits have crept onto the street for other properties.  Couldn't bullseye Lindau with the internet, and my dad just couldn't spot it on the road.

We looked for the location of the off-license on Park Lane, too.  We narrowed-down the area using maps and memory, but no building was specifically recognizable to dad as the off-license.

Our next intended stop was the High Lane Chippy -- a mythical place like Avalon where I had the best fish and chips -- and mushy peas -- in my life back in 1988.  We had a couple of contenders from an internet search, and we were off to find a great lunch!

Along the way I did spy the community centre in Poynton where Jonathan and I had filled-in for the day in a rehearsal for a production of Sleeping Beauty being put on by the local youth group back in the Summer of 1988.  We took turns playing the role of the Prince and we endeared ourselves to the local lassies.

My Dad and I reached High Lane and found a place to park.  We found the fish and chips place we thought might be the right one.  It wasn't, and it was closed on Sundays, anyway.  Instead, we lunched at the nearby Horseshoe Pub, a Robinson's House.

We had a good and filling lunch, then walked around for a bit.  Not too far away, we spotted a canal narrowboat plying one of the local canals.

Quaint Cheshire Canal Boat

If you look closely, there is a dog wearing an orange tabard on the left bank.  The dog belonged to the boat, and as the canal boat passed under the bridge on which we were standing the dog leapt from the bank back onto the boat to continue his journey with his boat and human companions.  Sometimes it's the little things you see on your trip that are just so cool.

We returned to Manchester and our hotel shortly after our walk along High Lane.  We decided to take a public bus into the heart of Manchester to see how we could spend our afternoon hours.  My dad had looked into a tour of the Robinson's brewery before we left for our trip, but he hadn't reserved spots for the tour and the only tour of the day was fully-booked when we inquired from the hotel.  Too bad.

Instead, we went to the Brew Dog microbrewery which has good marks on TripAdvisor.  We weren't disappointed.  We bought two samplers - each sampler had four 1/3-pint glasses of four varieties of their beers -- eight different beers in all.  About 5 of them were quite decent, and my Dad and I each ordered a full pint of our favorites after finishing the sampler trays.  We also had an early dinner at the Brew Dog -- my dad had brisket and I had BBQ pork ribs and burnt (deliberately) spicy baked beans. Yum!  We were frankly camera-weary and neither of us whipped out our camera to shoot a picture of the place.

We returned to the hotel as the sun was setting and we unwound from our day in the lounge.  We reviewed our list of things we wanted to do on the trip, and we found that we had ticked-off nearly every item.  One item we missed -- having some real Cheshire cheese.  Is that enough of an excuse to come back and tour the UK again??

I'm really proud of my Dad.  We had a great trip and experienced a lot of quality father-son time, even when we had a little tiff over the quality of my Dad's initial driving skills way back in Inverness.  We realized that you can never really go home again, as the famous author quipped, but that the reward comes from the attempt and not in reaching the destination.  That's really a metaphor for one of the reasons behind our trip to the UK -- we can never have my Mom back, but we can keep her memories with us as we continue on our journeys, enjoying the experiences of our travels regardless of our ultimate destinations.  The reward is cherishing the past while applying it as a filter to our present and to our future endeavors.  It has been a healthy and fulfilling trip.

It has also been a tiring trip!  We fly home tomorrow, early, so I think I'll knock-off and get some sleep.  Probably one more post for this trip -- the long promised food and lodging special!  You'll get to see where we slept and what we ate ... you won't want to miss it!

Greater Manchester - Stalybridge, Cheshire

We packed up our things in Llandudno and headed to the train station early this morning, Saturday 17th August.  Needed to get out of Dodge before the old-folks cornered us and made us play dominoes -- or shuffleboard....

We arrived at Manchester Piccadilly rail station after a 2-hour train ride, at just shy of Noon.  We located and collected our rental car -- a neat little Fiat 500 like the ones they're selling now in the States.  The car rental agent gave us a little bit of a hard time -- our reservation was for 11 AM but we didn't arrive at the counter until just after Noon -- the rental place was open until 1 PM.  We think the guy wanted to leave early, but we were the last to collect our car.

  Dad's turn to drive, and he did much better than his inaugural drive with a much larger car back in Inverness.  I only cringed twice.

We located our hotel on the outskirts of Manchester-proper, the Diamond Lodge, with little difficulty in only about a half-hour.  We were able to check in early and we got settled into our room.  We decided it was high-time to head out in search of a pineapple, or more properly THE Pineapple, my great-grandfather's pub and the place where my Dad lived until relocating permanently to the States when he was about 12 years old.  A half-hour drive from the hotel and we were in the small Cheshire town of Stalybridge.

We already knew that the pub was closed -- my Dad's pre-trip research had disclosed that the pub had been sold less than a year ago.  We found it nonetheless, just so he could physically touch the walls and see what the old neighborhood looked like.

The old neighborhood didn't really exist anymore.  When my Dad lived there, there were small row-houses to the left of the pub, arranged around a central courtyard where the outhouses were -- only the pub had indoor plumbing at that point in time (yes, my Dad is THAT old!)  The row-houses and courtyard don't exist anymore.  My Dad's room -- he thinks -- was the one shown in the first picture on the second floor at the right end of the building.  The entrance used to be on the right-hand corner, but had been relocated sometime after the pub left the family's hands.

Less than a quarter mile away, on a "main" street in "downtown" Stalybridge - Grosvenor Street, was the Grosvenor Hotel (just a pub - no rooms to rent), which my Grampy ran for a few years when my Dad was even younger, before the family moved back to the States for the first time (my Dad was born in the US, the family relocated to England for a few years when my Grampy ran the Grosvenor, returned to the States after a few years, and then came back to England shortly after my great-grandfather died to help my great-grandmother run the Pineapple.)  There is no Grosvenor Hotel anymore, and Dad wasn't even certain which building it had been.

Grosvenor Street itself is no longer a street, either -- it has been turned into a pedestrian zone with shops on either side.

We located a pub for a late lunch.  The first pub we tried, full of pre-gaming football hooligans (Manchester United was to play its season-opener later in the afternoon against Swansea), didn't actually serve food, so we found another one 100 yards away -- part of the JD Wetherspoon chain of pseudo-pubs with cheap but decent eats (we have eaten at one or two others during our trip).  This particular pub had the single best men's room either of us have ever had the pleasure to experience -- the decor, cleanliness, lighting and layout are sublime.  It's hard to explain, but you need to pee in the men's room of the JD Wetherspoon pub in Stalybridge if you ever have the chance.

After lunch we sought out Dad's old School -- West Hill Primary.  It still exists, but is now some sort of science-focused junior college and no longer what we would consider a grade school.  The gates to the grounds were locked, so we took the opportunity for a photo-op at the school's sign:

We returned to the hotel shortly thereafter, after walking through the extensive and beautiful park which abuts the West Hill School.  It started to rain pretty hard and continued to rain through the evening.  Dad and I braved the rain to walk around the neighborhood of the hotel, but there was nothing really to recommend the area -- and no pubs or food places to speak of.  Fortunately, our hotel has a full bar and a restaurant so we were able to relax, have dinner and a few drinks, watch some of the Manchester United game, and take it a little easy.  We both frankly needed a little down-time.

Tomorrow we visit the town of Poynton, where my great-great uncle and aunts (Billy, Ethel and Amy) lived, and where I stayed for two weeks in the summer of 1988 with my Nana and my cousin Jonathan, who celebrates his nuptials in California in just about a week!

Stay tuned!

Interesting VacaKen Sidebar, Entry Seven:

Lots of luggage looks alike.  That’s why lots of people try to personalize their luggage with “unique” marks, tags or dangles.  Unfortunately for lots of people, their “unique” embellishments are similar to those of many other people.  My Grandmother came up with a truly unique bag marker, which adorns my rolling bag:  You know the plastic mesh bags that onions come in from the supermarket?  Yup – I tie part of an onion bag to my luggage handle – NO ONE else uses that as a bag indentifier!!  Even rarer, mine is yellow rather than the more ordinary red!

Wales Day 2, Part II - Conwy

My dad and I left Caernarfon by public bus to Conwy at about 1:15. We had purchased day tickets in Llandudno costing £6.50 for unlimited travel on the public buses operated by Arriva in northern Wales. For three hours of total bus riding in the course of the day I'd say not bad! Bus service is frequent and efficient, but I have to give Arriva poor marks for its website - you can't make heads or tails of the fee structure and the travel zones, so we were at the mercy of the driver to charge us the correct price.

OK, back to castle talk! Conwy castle was built during the reign of Edward I, just like Caernarfon, toward the end of the 13th century. It, too, is built near to the sea and inside the town - both Caernarfon and Conwy are walled towns, and large portions of the medieval town walls still exist. The next two pictures are actually of portions of the town wall in Caernarfon. The third wall picture is from Conwy.
 

Conwy Castle is nearer to square than Caernarfon - or any other castle we've seen on this trip. You could also walk almost the entire way around on the battlements. 

Because I know you like it, here's a really brief video clip from atop the battlements. Reminder, surf to www.vacaken.com to access the clip if you can't access it from the email summary!


Cool, huh? We climbed in and out of little rooms and passageways within the castle walls and towers. The circular staircases were steep and a bit dizzying, but at least the stair treads in Conwy had been widened a bit - the treads in Caernarfon were likely the originals and were probably less than 9" wide at the widest part!  You can see why the caretakers of the castles posted nicely-worded "pass at your own risk" signs. 


 
 

We spent a couple hours or so enjoying the castle and the cute town of Conwy. We caught a bus back to the old-folks town at about 4:45, and we arrived back at the hotel by 5:30. We made dinner reservations at an Italian place, Mama Rosa's, that was highly recommended by the staff at our B&B and by the community on TripAdvisor. The food and service were awesome, and the recommendations were well-deserved. 
Tomorrow we take our last train of our journey, back to England and the northern industrial town of Manchester! Check back later for more!!

Wales Day 2, Part I - Caernarfon

We got up reasonably early today, 16th August, for our breakfast at the B&B and to catch a bus for Caernarfon, Wales - a ride of a hair more than 90 minutes. Our plan was to combine our castles quest with stops on the Remembrance Tour - my Mom and Dad had visited the castles at Caernarfon and Conwy on their honeymoon. Plus, by leaving Llundudno for the day we could avoid the omnipresent old-people smell for a while.
We arrived in Caernarfon by about 11 AM and we were greeted by more great weather, as you can see in the pictures.
Caernarfon Castle is in the middle of the old town, and it's also the seat of the Prince of Wales. HRH Charles, Prince of Wales was invested with the title in this castle by his mother way back - in fact, less than a year before my parents visited the castle in July, 1970. The ceremony to invest the heir with the title Prince of Wales in Wales itself was revived by the Queen. A special slate platform (now permanently installed in the center of the castle grounds) and slate thrones were commissioned for the event. The intent is that the investiture of a Prince of Wales should continue to take place here in the future. I'm not sure what happened previously - I must have missed that information panel in the exhibit.


Caernarfon Castle is not a near total ruin, like Helmsley and Rievaulx are. It's not in decent shape, either - its somewhere in between. Its walls and towers are more or less intact and you can climb most of the towers and walk through passages within the walls. Not much in the way of interior buildings remain. Caernarfon is a smallish castle, and evokes the idealized mental image of what a castle should look like.
   


A good hour-plus of touring Caernarfon left us satisfied and content. And hungry. We decided to find a pub in Caernarfon for lunch before hopping a bus to Conwy (which is on the way back to Llandudno from Caernarfon, and about an hour away.)
We settled on the Four Alls pub, a free house a couple of blocks from the castle and the surrounding tourist area. A free house means that the pub is neither owned by nor exclusively licensed to a particular brewery. If a pub is owned or licensed by a brewery, its sign/exterior will be clearly marked with the name of the brewery (my great granfather's pub, the Pineapple, was a Robinsons house.)
The pub's sign defines what the 4 "Alls" are: the monarch rules for all, the soldier fights for all, the minister prays for all and the merchant pays for all. There is also a fifth All on the sign, if you look closely to the right of the merchant in the lower right quadrant - a devil-like character proclaims that it takes from all. 

Next stop - and post - Conwy!!

Interesting VacaKen Sidebar, Entry Six:

I’ve been studying up on digital photography to better use my Canon EOS Rebel T3i DSLR camera.  It has several pre-set “point-and-shoot” modes, and those are the settings I’ve primarily used on my previous trips.  I bought the “For Dummies” book for the camera, and a good friend of mine who owns a camera shop sat down with me and my Dad to go over the manual settings available (thanks, Brian!).  I’ve been playing around with shutter speed, f-stops/aperture and ISO settings on this trip to try and improve the photos I take.  What do you think?

Llandudno, Wales - the Sarasota of the UK

We made it to Llandudno on the northwest coast of Wales after making two train changes from York, arriving in Llandudno in the early afternoon of 15th August. We were able to check into the Grafton B&B straight away and we got ourselves sorted with alacrity. Our first stop - the Imperial Hotel, where my parents stayed on their honeymoon.

Imperial Hotel, Llandudno, Wales

We had a late lunch at the Imperial, to toast my parents and to offer ourselves an auspicious welcome to this quaint Victorian seaside resort (the Irish Sea, if anyone is wondering).

It's at the Imperial that I began to suspect that I was among the younger crowd in town. As we watched the world go by on the outdoor terrace, I realized that the world moved a little more slowly here - a plethora of canes, walkers, scooters and wheelchairs paraded before me on the promenade. I started to tease my Dad that we were at his kind of resort town, but I desisted as he began to get a little defensive about it. He has a lot of good memories from this place, like when he and my Mom went to a discotheque down the street at another hotel and she got (uncharacteristically) smashed on screwdrivers and he ended up letting her sleep it off in the Imperial's bath tub.

My Dad worked his way into grudging and humorous acceptance of my observations about the median age of the place.  I told him to look on the bright side - other than maybe in Florida, he can count himself as a member of the younger crowd in Llandudno.
This is an actual picture taken as we walked down the street from the Imperial toward the Pier.  Every seaside resort town has to have a pier. 
 
We walked the length of the pier and back.  Our original plan, to ride the cog train up the Great Orme, was put on hold by unanimous consent as the heavens started to open up on us. Instead we hightailed it back to the B&B to wait out the rain. I braved the rain and found us an off-license (a package store - liquor store) where I picked up a couple of beers to help us wait out the rain.

Mostyn Street, Llandudno, Wales at Twilight - August, 2013

The rain faded along with the sun and we made our way to a fish and chips place. We were anticipating a good meal as the place had won an award for 2012. Unfortunately everyone must get a trophy nowadays and the place was mediocre at best, and pretty greasy. The dessert, a jam roll, was pretty good.
We didn't do too much else our first night in Llandudno - for a resort town there is a dearth of decent pubs and the hotel bars are way overpriced. I don't think the seniors like to go out after dark, anyway.

The next morning, 16th August, we had a very serviceable breakfast at our B&B and we readied ourselves for castle-palooza - to Caerarfon and Conwy Castles - two well-preserved Edwardian castles from the 13th century. The day greeted us with a rainbow, too.

Stay tuned for the awesome castles at Caernarfon and Conwy!

Interesting VacaKen Sidebar, Entry Five:

I don’t usually buy a lot of souvenirs when I travel.  A couple of small items only, or freebie beer coasters from pubs.  Instead, I turn my photos into souvenirs.  I have had several of my better photos turned into canvas prints via the CVS Photo website (thanks Darlene for the idea!), and I’ve used these canvas prints as wall art throughout my house.  They lighten the place up and keep me drooling for more travel.  Amsterdam, Salzburg and Bruges adorn my living room walls, and a huge 30”x40” canvas print of a fine art painting from the Kunsthalle in Hamburg hangs in my bedroom.
Oh, and a spooky pic of a Neanderthal skull from the Teyler's Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands, stares at me from the back of my toilet when I pee.

North Yorkshire - The Ruins at Helmsley and Rievaulx

Today, 14th August, we're castle hunting! We have been to a couple of castles so far - the still-in-use Windsor and Edinburgh castles. Today we're visiting the ruins of Helmsley Castle in Helmsley (I just like typing Helmsley -- reminds me for some reason of The Jeffersons). We will also explore what's left of Rievaulx Abbey. My parents visited both over 43 years ago.


Here's what's left of the remaining tower of Helmsley Castle. Helmsley (as I type it again, "Moving on up!" is playing on a loop in my head) began life in the 12th century. It was largely destroyed during a series of conflicts between the royalists and the parliamentarians during the English civil war.
As you can see the weather remains great - partly cloudy and upper 60s.


 
 
It took about 40 minutes to drive from Thirsk to Helmsley. The road conditions varied from normal city street and normal-width country road to 25% inclines on curvy roads barely a car width - meant as two-way streets - and the sides of the road were either tall walls and thickets or deep ditches.
My Dad and I brought a picnic with us, and we ate it while sitting on a bench in the market square of the Town of Helmsley. Had we known, we could have picnicked in the castle ruins itself - several families had been doing just that. 

Lunch sorted out, we drove about twenty minutes to Rievaulx Abbey. The Abbey is located pretty much in the middle of nowhere - not town-adjacent as Helmsley Castle had been. The road to get there were sporty....

Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire, England - August, 2013

Rievaulx Abbey was the home to Cistercian monks up until shortly after Henry VIII decided that divorce was preferable to papal authority and created the Church of England. The abbot wasn't too keen on the new game in town and created enough of a ruckus that the Abbey was forfeit to the crown. During its operation, the Abbey tended and harvested wool from sheep and did farming - one disastrous year (some sort of sheep plague) put the abbey in hock. The abbey never fully recovered from that, making the crown's take-over that much easier. Henry VIII took over a lot of Church property in this way. 

Sanctuary of Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire, England, August 2013

Still photos are pretty, but don't always convey the full scope and scale. To try my hand at being more of a conveyancer, here's a brief 2 minute video of the "inside" of the main sanctuary, pictured above. Friendly reminder - you may need to visit this page on www.vacaken.com to view the video. 


Rievaulx is pretty darned cool. 
 

A 25 minute car ride brought us back to Thirsk and the end of our last day in the Yorkshire Dales. Tomorrow we head back to the city of York, return the car, and head by train to the Riviera of northern Wales - Llandudno!

North Yorkshire - The Market Town of Thirsk

We arrived in York at about 1:30 PM on 13th August. We located the car hire service and picked up our car - a bright red Toyota Yaris. This time I drove. It took about 40 minutes to drive to the Gallery B&B in the market town of Thirsk. We found it with little difficulty. We've been using Google Maps on our iPhones for turn-by-turn directions and so far the maps have been pretty darned good. The cheap USB cigarette lighter adapters I picked up before the trip have been great to keep our phones charged while using the battery-intensive Maps and GPS features.


One of the first shops we saw on entering the town was a little sandwich shop. But, as it shares a name with one of my nephews, I thought I'd take a picture of it. 
Thirsk is in the heart of North Yorkshire, and is the local town for the surrounding farms and hamlets. The marketplace in the town center is charming and contains eateries, small shops, 3 small supermarkets and about a dozen pubs. Apparently Thirsk has some, err, Thirst.


Thirsk's largest attraction, however, aside from its quaint charm, is the James Herriot Museum.

The Herriot Museum chronicles the life of Vetrinarian James Wight (Herriot was a pen name). The first half of the museum explores the "real James Herriot" and the second part follows his rise to fame through his books ("All Creatures Great and Small" was the breakout hit in the U.S.), the BBC television series that was more popular in the U.S. (the Downton Abbey of its day in the 70s) and the TV movies. The last bit of the museum records the history of veterinary practice.

 
ABOVE, Left: beloved character Mrs. Pumphrey and her dog, Tricky-woo wait to be seen by Dr. Herriot. Poor Tricky-woo has been stricken with flop-bott again. Right: My Dad, also suffering from flop-bott, sits down in one of the TV series sets, attempting to learn his lines. 
The museum was very well done, whether you are a particular fan of Herriot or not. There is also a 20 minute video, hosted by Christopher Timothy (who starred as Herriot in the TV series), which is well worth seeing and which is the transition point from the "real" Herriot to the famous one. There is even an interactive section of the museum, allowing kids of all ages the chance to dig in, elbows deep.



An udderly brilliant experience!We strolled around the Thirsk marketplace, checked out the historic church not far from the center, and took the opportunity to do some washing-up.

 

Next we'll head further into the Yorkshire countryside and explore the ruins of Helmsley Castle and Rievaulx Abbey!

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Interesting VacaKen Sidebar, Entry Four:
My favorite travel accessory?  My bottle-opener.  There really aren’t twist-off tops for bottled beer in Europe, and bottles are better than cans.  You can also buy soft drinks in glass bottles with caps – although plastic bottles with twist-offs are taking over.
My second favorite travel accessory?  My toenail clippers.  Although useful to trim your nails, I’ve used them more frequently to open stubborn packages, trim wayward threads and clip open zip ties I’ve used to secure my luggage in the hotel from casual snooping by chambermaids.