Wales – The Blue Van – Overland Travels

A Comprehensive Update Part 1: Florida to Liverpool

admin — Sat, 23 Jan 2016 20:15:50 +0000

Celebration Station!

We left Florida later than we intended. The camper needed to be customized for Team DeCorso – new sofa, new table, 5 bunks with an optional 6th bunk, bunk lights and chargers, a new oven/stove, upgrades to the running lights, a new stereo and speakers, new countertop in the kitchen, 14 hooks for coats and an overall upgrading of the camper (like scraping off the pink & blue gnocchi-like wallpaper border that was added to the bathroom and kitchen). During this time, we had a great stay in Florida! Swimming, bike riding, Snapple-drinking good time with grandpa & grandma!.

We left Florida on October 10, so very late as we needed to be in Halifax to catch our flight to Glasgow on October 20th.

Steak & Shake!

Bay of Fundy

The USA & Canada

We raced up the eastern seaboard. In Asheville, we visited Aunt Alice and cousin Mary. In Cleveland, we visited Grandma Dorothy and Aunt Pat & Uncle Smitty. Jack visited Carnegie Mellon and spent an evening with their pipe band. In New York, Mark realized he did not have the title to the camper and we had to send power of attorney to Ryan at a FedEx. In New Hampshire, someone hit our mirror while we were parked and broke it off. In Maine, we went out for lobster with the legendary Joni McNutt. In Calais, we fetched the camper title from FedEx. We drove around the Bay of Fundy, watched the tidal bore and arrived in Halifax on 10/18. We woke up early on 10/19 to discover that the transmission had completely failed. A panicked call to Mr Transmission, and $3000 (thankfully Canadian) later our camper was on the road again. Mr Transmission lent us a pick up truck so we could run our final errands and do our final paperwork for shipping the camper over. On the morning of October 20th, the camper had to be at the quay before 11am but our flight did not leave until 10pm. We spent the day sightseeing in Halifax , learning about the great Halifax Explosion and the Titanic Exhibit. Two things we learned: the explosion released the equivalent energy of 2.9 kilotons of TNT and Halifax was the staging ground for rescuing people from the sinking Titanic, although all they recovered were dead people and a sad collection of items like dolls and baby shoes.

Edinburgh

Our plane landed in Glasgow and we caught a Citylink bus to Edinburgh and were at our lovely home by 11am. Ourhouse was literally 41 steps off the Royal Mile, on Bell’s Wynd. Later, in a bookstore in Leith, we would read in Haunted Edinburgh that our house was haunted. The house was perfect for us, the location was fabulous.

The camper departed Halifax on 10/24 and was supposed to take 7 days to get to Liverpool but a storm in the north Atlantic delayed the ship and we were happy to extend our stay in our little house on the Royal Mile to 3 weeks. We had a really great, super fun, amazing time in Edinburgh. We went to Tesco and bought a ton of weird British food (vegetarian haggis, clotted cream, crumpets, bangors, swedes, neeps, bramble jelly, turkish delight and several chutneys). We went to the Scottish National Gallery. We went to the Royal Botanical Gardens. We visited the castle. We went to almost every pub, or so it seemed. One night, Mark and Jack and I went to a small pub

Royal Mile looking towards Holyrood

with traditional music and had a great night of drinking, singing and dancing. We went on the Harry Potter Tour, in the poring rain, and saw where JK Rowling wrote the books, the inspiration (and grave) of Tom Riddle, Diagon Alley and much more.

We spent Halloween here. Sylvia and Annabelle went trick or treating in neighborhood of old gothic mansions. They had to do a trick at every house to get candy. Max supplied one excellent joke that no one had yet heard here: Why does Peter Pan fly? Because he can Never Land. We found the neighborhood from someone we met at the Unitarian Church in Edinburgh. We also went to the Royal Botanical Gardens on Halloween and did the Witch Hunt Trail, where you had to collect information on magical plants for a surprise. That night, was the Samhain Festival at the Grassmarket, a torch procession and very well attended.

Sylvia’s favorite painting at the National Gallery

Halloween Vampire Princess

Halloween at the Botanical Gardens

Bell’s Wynd

Samhain at Grassmarket

Bridge to island uncovered at low tide

Liverpool

Catching the early train

Finally the camper arrived in Liverpool. Team DeCorso got up way too early and took a train to Liverpool. While Mark fetched the camper, Jack & Jennah went on a quest to find the house where John Lennon was born and Annabelle, Sylvia, Max and I went to the Albert Docks, World Herit age Site (not exciting at all).

Mark appeared with the camper and we piled inside and began the long task of preparing it for travel. We had screwed all the doors shut and put paneling over all compartments and screwed that shut, a basic RORO safety measure. Turns out, someone did steal stuff from our camper, it seems they always do. They took our Tide-scented Febreeze, a string of solar LED lights and, sadly, Mark’s drill so unscrewing became much more work. Next we had to find water, gas and propane (which required a fitting which had to be shipped from Oxford). While we unscrewed cabinets and waited for the fitting for the propane, we camped north of Liverpool at Crosby Beach, site of the 99 Iron Men statues. We also rode out the first storm

Rain gear!

with a name in UK history, which battered the camper with 75mph winds. We had to move in the middle of the night to find more shelter. We also went to a store called Go Outdoors! and bought all of Team DeCorso suitable rain gear, jackets, boots, umbrellas and hats.

Then, with fuel and water and propane, we started on our left-driving journey.

Traditional pub vegetarian breakfast

Pub breakfast – rashers and bangors

Kabobs, Pizza and Burgers

admin — Fri, 04 Dec 2015 00:14:24 +0000

We have been driving around Wales for about three weeks. In those 21 days, I think maybe four of them have been sunny. The rest have been filled with a clothes drenching drizzle – mist, or pounding rain. If we’re lucky, there’s also 60mph winds to accompany the rain. This point is most accurately described by the time we visited Harlech Castle, one of the four castles built by King Edward I in Wales, hundreds of years ago. Along with Harlech, there is Conwy, Caernarfon and Beaumaris. The best castle out of all of them was probably Conwy or Beaumaris. The day we visited Harlech, it was blowing so hard that when Jack and I walked up onto the castle walls,we almost fell off and were saved by a handsome stranger. If you leaned into the wind, you wouldn’t fall forward. The castles are fun for pretending to be country men, which Jack and I pretend to be when we’re exploring the castle. This usually means standing on the tallest tower, pretending to smoke pipe weed (what they smoke in the Lord of the Rings), calling each other “my good fellow” and talking about the peskiness of wives. Something that I have noticed about Wales, or the UK in general, is that almost everywhere there are restaurants that sell “Kebabs Pizza Burgers” in that combination. They are more common than fish and chip places, and show up even in the most remote of villages. The restaurants are also almost aways accompanied by pictures of chicken nuggets and pizza dancing around. In Chester,there was a weird café modeled after the one in the TV show Friends. Inside there were big TVs playing the show and sketches of the characters and their houses all over the wall. A couple of days ago we were in Cardiff, and went to the Doctor Who Experience, where we went on a simulation of the TARDIS and had to go through fields of various Doctor Who criminals. It was pretty cool, and Sylvia got picked to talk to the Doctor, who called her an android. After Cardiff, we went to Pembrokeshire, wher e it was again, rainy. We walked around but there wasn’t much there, so we drove to another spot on the beach. There were huge waves and at night Jack and I explored a near by field. It was full of sinister looking mounds of dirt (ant hills? land mines?) so we quickly left, making sure not to step on any of them. The next morning we drove for a while until we got to where we are tonight, Aberystwyth, one of the biggest towns in Wales. -Jennah

Castles, Christmas Fairs, Rain and Dr Who

admin — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 23:26:25 +0000

Castles here are very interesting. They are quite fun and I had quite a fun time in them. But some parts are quite sad like war fields and battles and towers where people died. In one castle there was a display made completely out of thin wood and it looked like a merry-go-round and it told the story of a little Spanish Princess who married at age 11 to a 13 year old prince to soon become the Queen of Wales. At 13 she had a baby and at 15 she had another child that died at birth. She had 16 babies but only 6 lived. She came from Spain, a sunny place, to Wales, a dark stormy rainy every day place where the sun only comes out for 30 minutes a day and mostly it is just dark and if you were on the top of a castle, you would be blown away by the wind. She had a baby when she was age 20 and she was under house arrest when she was pregnant with her child and she had her child in prison and the baby died at 8 months old. That is pretty sad. At two of the castles, there was this game where you had to try to find stuff and you got a pin or stickers at the end, that was fun. In Wales, it was dark and windy almost all the time, There was only a few minutes of sunlight. The weather was rainy and dreary. It was mostly cloudy and rainy and if it was not cloudy, it was drenching rain like buckets being dumped on your head. We stopped at the store a long time ago and got nice rain jackets and a few days ago I got there really nice shoes that are like tennis shoes but waterproof and they match my rain jacket exactly. The wind is really windy here. We went to one castle when it was really windy. It was Harlech Castle. There was this one spot that if you went there you nearly got forced back. My dad took a video and it looks like my sister got blown away. My two brothers unzipped their jackets and the wind was blowing and it looked like a big giant marshmallow. We went into a hole that was sort of sealed off and it was dark. Every castle we went to had ancient toilets. They were big pits that leaded out into the moat. You sat on it.

We went to these Christmas Fairs that were really cool, they have ton of lights at them. We went to one that was where the book Alice in Wonderland was created. I bought a bag of chocolate there that was really good. It had a few long tents that were filled with tiny shops and there was a lot of cheese tasting. I liked that. Outside this church there was this guy who owned five or six owls. One was tiny and cute, I think it was an elf owl – could not have been one from the desert because it would be freezing cold. It’s freezing cold here. It’s warmer than Alaska but it is not warm.

We went to a Christmas fair in Cardiff and it was so windy that there were garbage cans of broken umbrellas and broken umbrellas on the ground everywhere. They were broken because it was so windy there. It was pouring rain. And then we went into a store and got an Advent calendar.

My mom & dad said they were going to give us a big surprise. They took me to a museum of my favorite tv show, DR WHO!
There was a museum and first you got to walk through an experience that made it felt like you were on the TV show itself. At the end, we got to go to a museum that had the real clothes from the show like the Doctor’s clothes, he was the main character in the show and he regenerated, and his companions, I remember everyone of them. The first one was named Rose. The very best thing was that we got to go there. It was really cool.