We can hear the surf crashing just outside our window!
So, yeah, we got to Aberystwyth with no problem on a scenic three-hour bus ride. I have no idea how drivers manage big vehicles on these roads, and the secret is, sometimes they don't; at one point one lane of the (theoretically) two-lane road (one lane in each direction, that is) (well, two-thirds of a lane in each direction) anyway one lane was closed, and the driver couldn't turn the bus into the other lane, avoiding parked cars and cars waiting to come the other way, until he got out and moved one of the "lane closed" signs a couple of feet back. And there were plenty of times when the roadside hedge was audibly brushing the bus windows as we went by, and a couple of times when we came around a corner to find ourselves abruptly almost nose to nose with an oncoming car, which usually had to back up to let the bus complete the turn. Disconcerting to those of us used to wide North American roads with generous sidewalks or breakdown lanes; utterly unremarkable to the locals.
Aberystwyth is the big city compared to where we've been! According to Wikipedia, the twin towns of Fishguard and Goodwick, that we just came from, have a population of about 5400; Aberystwyth has maybe 18,000 depending on where you look? (And whether you're counting the university students, who won't arrive until just as we leave.) We went from the bus station first to the tourist info, where we picked up some flyers on coastal walks and such; then we staggered into the extremely strong wind coming off the ocean to our hotel, which was half a block from the shore.
Well. What we expected to be our hotel. It turned out to be a "self-check-in" place, meaning unstaffed; you walk in the unlocked door and the front desk has no human, just some folders with people's names on them, and you find yours and in it are your room key, hotel info, etc. You know you're in a low-crime area when! But there was no folder for us.
I poked my head further into the hotel and found a couple of guests in the lounge, who showed me the rather tucked-away button on the desk that might summon a staffer. It did not. So I phoned the number on the hotel's business card, a stack of which were also on the desk, and the guy who answered said a) he had no record of ever receiving our reservation through Booking.com, and b) the hotel was full, no vacancies. He was apologetic about it (while also anxious to assure me that he wasn't holding my money; Booking.com was), but there was flat-out nothing he could do.
I've never had that happen before! (Not that I use B.c that often, I always prefer to book direct, but sometimes either a hotel has completely outsourced its booking to third parties like B.c or B.c just has better rates and cancellation policies.) I had multiple confirmations from B.c, but apparently they were all auto-sent without the hotel's involvement.
So that was stressful! Geoff and I camped out in the hotel's wee lobby for a bit. I had my printout of B.c's confirmation in one hand, their website open on my ipad in my lap, and with my other hand I was phoning B.c customer support. Fortunately I did connect quickly with a human, who put me on hold briefly to call the hotel himself and confirm that they couldn't house me (I presume to ensure that I wasn't just trying to scam an upgrade) and then told me that B.c would cancel that booking and email me some possible alternatives, and I could book one of them and B.c would pick up any extra cost above what the original place would have cost.
He said the email might take 30-45 minutes to arrive, but in fact it took only a few minutes -- which I expected to be the case, since it's all automated; it's not like there was someone hand-curating my options, although the agent's spiel made it sound like there was. I picked the one with the best B.c reviews that was close by and on the shoreline, hastily booked it, and off we went into the wind again!
The new hotel is actually in a slightly better location and has an actually staffed front desk (by incredibly cheerful and friendly young women), and we're on the second floor ("first" to Brits) with a bay window looking directly out at the beach and the waves rolling in. (Today they're rolling. Yesterday they were crashing. Either way it's a lovely sound to fall asleep to.) There's also a small table and two chairs in the bay, to sit in and watch the ocean, but frankly Geoff has dumped his stuff all over them (my stuff is dumped all over the floor on the other side of the bed) and we like to just sit in bed, from which we have almost as good a view. And the bathroom is large, and has plenty of flat space on which to put toiletries etc., and also has a tub. Yay!
The only difficulty now is that I am absolutely morally certain that the agent told me on the phone that if I chose one of the options B.c sent me, they'd pick up the whole price difference; but the email actually says that they'll pick up up to £51 and change. The actual price difference is £105. I'm prepared to fight them on this (the phone call "may have been recorded for training and verification purposes," after all), but if we lose, well, worse things happen at sea.
Once we'd successfully checked in to the new place, we went out to stretch our legs and look around the center of town a bit. And we started by going back to an outdoor-gear store we'd walked past on our way to the tourist info, that was having a going-out-of-business sale!
I'd realized a few days before that the coating that lined my rain pants was disintegrating; they were shedding a fine white grit. And they had eventually soaked through, in that storm we were in. Durable water repellency doesn't endure forever. Also, my everyday backpack is a basic Jansport school bag; it's fine for its intended use, and I like that it's big enough to serve as weekend luggage (I'd say it's thirty liters) while still small enough to fit under an airplane seat, but when I load it up with rain pants, rain jacket, one or two midlayers, one or two water bottles, lunch, emergency first aid supplies, and so on for a serious day's hiking, I really regret its lack of a waist belt. Also I only have a cheap third-party rain cover for it, which you may remember proved totally inadequate against a real rainstorm. (I sure remember.) And, the other day, I noticed a thinning at its bottom where the material was beginning to think about wearing through; not immediately, but that's not something I want to run risks with. And I don't have a rain cover for my big (seventy-liter) hiking pack at all.
So we stopped into the store and I scored heavily discounted replacements for all of the above! Including a thirty-liter daypack with not only a proper waist belt and ventilated back panel but -- what I didn't realize until I got it back to the hotel and was exploring all its pocketses in detail -- its own integrated rain cover! Win.
After that we just wandered around a bit, and spent a good amount of time clambering around the ruins of the coastal castle, which was fun and dramatic and also very windy omg. We eyeballed a bunch of restaurants, but nothing screamed out "eat here" to us.
So we went back and had dinner in the hotel restaurant, because we were not up for researching a place; I had done enough frantic internet juggling for one day.
me at dinner last night: I think I'll have a big glass of wine.
Geoff: You should. You deserve it.
me: I had a very stressful five minutes!
(He did loyally remind me that in fact it was longer than that.)
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the_shoshanna) wrote2025-09-19 01:50 pm
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