Bala, the centre of the world

Bala.. ever heard of it? Well yes and no.. it commandes a paragraph or so in the Lonely planet book simply because it has the National Watersports centre.. and some rapids apparently. I am slowly building up the belief that once you get out of a capital the ‘interesting ness’ quality of a town is directly proportional to the amount coverage it gets in a Lonely Planet guide book.. the more coverage the less interesting.. the less.. or no coverage.. the better.. or as the case may be, the more interesting. Do not misunderstand me, interesting does not equal, under any circumstance, better. There is only one case as yet where this particular observation is wrong.. and that is for a manor house BnB in.. a very small village in Scotland..

Well Bala fits the category of interesting.. the town itself is quite nice. Its small, has a disproportionate number of pubs (amazing amount, like 5ish for 1600 people) is in Wale’s largest naturally formed lake (with its own fish.. which has a relative in some Norwegian Fijord). Oh and half the people talk Welsh to each other, and to us. That bit is quite nice actually, Welsh is an interesting sounding language. It is very, well its described as musical.. although id go for more.. lilting.. or uppy downy in normal language (ie. Not flat to listen to) and aside from the *mach* and *och* sounds well sort of northern Euro.. kinda scandanavian..maybe.. definatly not a romance language though..But its quite nice to sit and listen to in a Pub, although i will admit i am well and truly over Pub food.. there is a limit to the number of Pies and chips, fish and chips etc. one can ever eat.. i may have reached said limit.

But that’s not the exciting bit, well the “interesting” bit. The point of note is this Bed and Breakfast we are currently staying in(the joys of travelling with your mother). It is run by two old people (not to be derogative at all..no not me.. PC all the way..lol) in their decidedly non-Welsh looking house. (this is what happens when you book through the information centre instead of just rocking up and bumbling through yourself) and the lady is that weird creepy old, where they look at you as if they have just forgotten for a moment why you were standing in front of them. And the guy is that kind of overly friendly, helpful chatty bloke (who like everyone) has relatives in Australia and expects you, if you don’t know them personally, to know the very town that they come from. *shudders* I wasn’t in a social mood this afternoon, and wasn’t overly inspired by the idea of getting a lecture on the local town (where did you think that the very accurate figures about Bala came from? Not imagined this time my dear friends, WHY do people develop this desire to tell me things? soemtimes its good.. this time.. no no no) but I got it anyway’s.. and of course being me the little annoying figures fitted themselves nicely into my brain (not the one about where the internet café was.. nothing useful ever sinks in).
So here I am, tapping away on my laptop (yay for laptops!!!) wishing for wireless (can you believe it? Two towns with NO wireless within striking distance, that means NO ONE with in a fair diameter has wireless.. talk about weird) and drinking port to numb the pain. Pain? I hear you ask..what pain? *shudders and shoots the last of the port* joke.. this room.. this room that I’m staying in.. is the pure embodiment of Purple, it is called the lilac room, and looks like the place where the anthropomorphic realisation of Purple (ie. If Purple was turned into a person, like the idea of the Grim reaper for Purple.. horrible thought isn’t it?) if that lass found itself here on Earth, or in Wales more specifically she would be more than happy staying in this room. Possibly even she would feel purpled out (thank god we didn’t get the Peach room), it is Purple to the max, Purple gone hardcore, Purple on steroids. The Lightshades, walls, carpet, pillows, doona, curtains, clock, towels, PICTUREFRAMES are all purple. That cannot be legal. There should be missiles designed to sense such high densities of purple and then to DESTROY!!!!! I’m sure there are other elements of this place worthy of description.. but I cant get past the purple.. it’s a giant mental block that im not programmed to deal with. So.. moving on.
We stayed at a cool place the night before last. Admittedly if all had gone well we wouldn’t have been staying there. It was my first day of navigating (after going to the Dr Who exhibition, which was uber cool.. we saw daleks.. various aliens, cybermen of course, and some pretty cool props.. oh! And Torchwood!! We went to, well we went to the Cardiff Millenium Centre, which is Torchwood.. talk about nerdy and exciting) and well.. it didn’t go as well as I would have liked. See navigating in the UK is slightly different. They do many things differently, starting with road names. They either a) don’t have them (wtf?? Do you know how HARD that makes navigating?) or b) in the city they have 3 roads with the same name within one block, so its not actually possible to find yourself. (we weren’t the only people to have troubles.. some kids with a GPS and google maps decided that they would have a better chance of finding their destination if they blindfolded themselves and generally bumped their way around the city).
So.. there’s no names on the roads, and the highways are all numbered (yay, lets pick on the Dyslexics yet again..). And then theres the distance issue. I mean for us it takes about 10mins as a general approximation to get from one town to the next.. obviously there are variations.. but there is normally enough time to see one town sign and then work out how you are going to get to the next town. NOT SO, no such luck. There seems to be maybe 2-3 mins approx between towns, and in some cases towns that are marked as two separate ones aren’t. and of course I didn’t know that, did i? I just did my normal navigator thing, thus getting totally confused (because roads would woosh past that weren’t marked, the road we were supposed to turn onto never turned up and villages would pass at what seemed like lightening speed so I count actually reference), and just slightly lost. Part of the problem may also be in our map. It doesn’t mark any roads once you get into a town, only the ones outside the town. But I guess a good crafts men never blames his tools.. or some such. So basically we ended up in this town (after looking at a cool castle, there are a lot of them) called Nelson so I decided that we should just head away from that and Cardiff in the general idea that that would get us somewhere.. for some freaky geological reason I just CANT work out.. it didn’t. Without back tracking.. going in a circle, or doing any of the normal things we travelled along a ridge dipped into a different valley and.. da da da da da.. ended up in Nelson again.. no matter how much I imagine that over and over again.. I have no idea how we managed that.. the only logical conclustion is that there were two towns called nelson. By this time we were slightly tired, I was stressed and frazzled and mum was over driving so we pulled into the first BnB pub thing we could find.. and it was actually lovely, they were all very friendly, educational and generally nice. It was amusing at dinner though, and at breakkie for that matter too.. because everyone tried to help give us directions to go to wherever we said we wanted to go to.. I think we said Snowdonia. But this led to the most Bill Brysony scenario I have encountered. Every bloke in the pub gathered around to help us, at cross purposes of course, and in one case in such a thick accent all I could do was smile and nod. It was actually hilarious. One got out his little book of road maps and made me write down all the town names we ahd to go through, and once they were written down I had to try and say the names. Talk about amusing (well for them anywyas.. I was just trying to pronounce them in a way that didn’t lead to me spraying spit everywhere) ever tried pronouncing “Aberystwyth” or “Llangollen”? I don’t recommend it without coaching. But they were really friendly, and of course we just followed the directions that the breakkie lady gave us, and they worked. Breakkie was lovely, the place was new as a B&B which meant that EVERYTHING was new. Including all the breakkie stuff, which was all Ikea, there is something appealing about that, a kind of familiarity about it.

So we headed off from Nelson, successfully got out of the town. (yay! Success at long last I swear my navigation isnt normally that bad) and visited another castle. It was very very cool.. and then we.. well we took a bit of a detour.. remind me never to do this again. Which meant that we took about twice as long as necessary, but we navigated up the coast, and up past many towns that we couldn’t pronounce, and generally had a good drive. We stayed in the Black lion hotel which was quite cool. The less cool thing was that breakkie included Black Pudding, which is quite a horrible thing, dried blood made into a ‘pudding’ shudders.. you would think that after a guine pig that would be fine.. but there was somthing about the consistancy.. like it wasnt quite dead enough.. (you would htink after being bled and dried it would be pretty dead.. but it seemed to have developed a second life..vampire pudding..haha)