We left Holyhead early on a 4.5 hour train ride (on three trains) to Blackpool via Liverpool.
The first train was comfortable and the Welsh countryside was beautiful. Here’s a station we stopped at not far out of Holyhead:
We also saw lots and lots and lots of sheep!
Eventually, around 2pm, we arrived in lovely Blackpool. Back when KLS, Jim and I visited England years ago this was the destination I wanted to return to the most, and as the destination of this trip I was very much looking forward to it. I’d been talking it up for weeks to Florence; it was going to be great!
It was awful.
Without laboring the point, here’s a list of why:
– Our B&B was in a gay red light district
– The B&B was locked when we arrived and we had to phone them to get in
– The owner was a creeper and the whole place made us extremely uneasy
– It was endlessly and heavily raining in Blackpool
– It was extremely cold
– The wind was cyclonic
– (Worst of all?) Everything was closed! We seem to have arrived in an off-season!
That’s the famous Blackpool tower, taken from inside an arcade on the North Pier. The pier itself was closed, as was the central pier and virtually every attraction on the Promenade. And the beaches.
I had purchased an umbrella which broke in the wind less than 2 blocks from the store. If the experience had been a comedy or errors, you’d laugh hysterically!
So what to do? Well everything had gone wrong, but fixing things would take only time and money and we had both to spend. I ate the Blackpool hotel cost, hastily booked us (on my phone) two nights in a Liverpool hotel and only three hours after arriving in Blackpool we fled on an outbound train!
There’s more to the tale, including the torture of actually finding our Liverpool hotel (shown above) and getting drenched due to indufficient clothes for the weather but much later that day, as we sat in a warm apartment laughing at reality TV with Blackpool only a memory I think we both felt the day had ended well and the vacation had been saved.
There’s lots to do in Liverpool, and as I write this I can even see a hint of sun outside. I don’t know what we’ll do today, but I know for certain it’ll be better than yesterday 🙂
