From: danm@ether.UUCP (Dan McDonald)
Newsgroups: rec.travel
Subject: Trip "Report" 2 weeks in UK w/baby
Keywords: Comments and Observations, mainly
Date: 13 Oct 92 21:42:08 GMT
Article-I.D.: ether.976
Organization: Handmade Designs, Salem, OR.


Several weeks ago, I posted to this newsgroup with some questions
regarding an upcoming trip to England and Wales with my wife and
baby.  We are back now, and I want to thank everybody who responded
for their helpful advice, and also to give a short report on our
opinions, experiences, and observations during this trip.  These now
follow, in no particular order.

We had a very good time, except for one or two long days in the car.
The baby took it all amazingly well, the rental car was great, the
weather was OK (only 2 days of rain), the English people were friendly
enough, and there was certainly enough to see and do.

We managed to visit Wiltshire, Cotswolds, Herefordshire, Northern Wales,
small part of Devon, and relatives near Birmingham.

    This was too much, and we are guilty of falling in to the "American
    Thing"--trying to see too much in too short a time.  In the future,
    we will stay in one place for several days and then leisurely move on.

Renting a car at Heathrow worked out the best for us, even though some
had recommended taking the train further out from London, then getting a
car.  We had far too much baggage to have been able to take a train
anywhere.  I was able to pretty much learn how to drive in the first 1/2
hour or so (which I did on "country" roads headed west from Heathrow), but
only after a lot of thinking about spacial relationships and rights and
lefts.  The car agency was a mile or two out of the central airport, and
was easy to get to and from.

Not seeing London was no big deal for us.  We may go back someday when
the baby can help carry stuff, be self-propelled, and capable of reason.
Based on the one city that we spent time in (Gloucester), we drew the
opinion that we were far better off in the countryside.  This city was
crowded, expensive, hard to park in, impersonal and forboding.  The
cathedral was nice.

Bed and Breakfasts were slightly more expensive than we had hoped for.
We paid 25-34 pounds total a night for the 2 of us plus baby.  As an
observation, I will say that after 10 days of it, the whole B & B industry
came across as the most perfect money-making scam I've seen in a while--
almost a license to print money, which in a tax-happy country is kind of
an odd thing.  They all preferred cash and only one kept any kind of 
official record (that I could see) that we had actually stayed there.
The "crown" ratings (up to 3) are absolutely meaningless (we don't know
about 4 and above, because we didn't stay there), and the price paid
does not reflect the quality of service received.  I got the (totally
unsubstantiated) uncomfortable feeling of behind-the-scenes price-fixing
as everything in an area was within a couple of pounds of each other.
It seemed in the more popular places that anybody with a spare room and
a frying pan had put out a sign--I don't blame them, and would do the
same myself, as it seems like a good way to make money in bad economical
times.  The "Traditional English" breakfasts provided were generally 
very good, and very filling.  We have not ever eaten so much meat in
such a short time.  When questioned, the natives will admit that they
don't eat breakfasts like that, except perhaps on holiday.  The good part
of it was that it pretty much kept us going until late in the day.

Speaking of scams, the National Trust came across as another one.  We
did not buy membership, and I think that if we went into every NT property
we came near, we may have recovered our investment.  But we did not
go into these, and rarely wanted to.  It did get a little unnerving to
come across a neat-looking place, then seeing their charge for admission.
The worst for this was ruins of a small castle in Wales.  A typical sign
was in the car park, but with no mention of admission price.  "Ah ha,"
naively think we, "finally a free one!"  Only after the walk up the hill
do we encounter the little gate and booth with a man asking for 75p.
If you want to spend your entire holiday going through these NT places,
then it's a good deal, and avoiding the  annoyance of admission prices
would be well worth it anyway.  The deal was, though, that we did not
want to spend our holiday shuffling through all of these things.  Our
first encounter with NT full force was at Avesbury (lots of free stuff
to see, a couple of places with admission), and we did not agree with
the way that they had rennovated their buildings there.  The staff
was also less than friendly.  This being our first taste of it, it kind
of soured the rest of the trip wrt NT.

Speaking of less than friendly help, we found this more often in Wales.
There were some exceptionally nice people there, but also more of the
other kind.  I rarely entered a shop where I did not feel a strange
atmosphere of "Yankee/English B*stards Go Home and Give Us Our Country
Back."  This was very unnerving, and contributed to our short stay in
the country that was initially going to be our whole destination.  In
conversation, we were able to get some to admit that the Welsh do need
the tourists to maintain an economy even though they wished they didn't.

We found Wales depressing, grey, dreary, and unfriendly.  We left the
day after we arrived.  I enjoyed the general desolation of the scenery in
Snowdonia Park, even with the RAF planes buzzing through the valleys at
tree-top level.  We will go back there someday and do some more serious
hiking and hill climbing.

Heathrow Airport left us with a great distaste.  Arrival was not too bad,
even though we had to take the bus from Terminal 4 to Terminal 3 to get
to our bags.  (we had taken a bump from a full United 747 to a 1/2 full
British Airways 747, which was a good deal for us.  The service and
comfort on BA was so far superior to UA that it made the 30-minute bus
ride and search for our luggage worth the effort).  Departure though,
was an agonizing process.
We arrived 2.5 hours early, thinking that that would be plenty of time.
We were wrong.  The United check-in process is so poorly managed and
designed that it is a wonder it has not been torn down by disgruntled
passengers yet.  Throughout the airport, there seemed to be interminable
line after line, each one leading to somebody wanting to see our passports
and boarding passes.  It was galling to compare the intense scrutiny that
our American passports received with the quick glance the British ones got.
We had thought that we were an innocent-looking family, but after this
experience we are no longer so sure.  One of our carry-on bags had the
misfortune of getting selected for the random search, and they located
something that they thought we should not take on the plane, so that
added another 20-30 minutes to our wait.  With 5 minutes left until
departure time of our flight, the helpful airport security supervisors
were busy assuring us that we had plenty of time.  We did not.  We did
finally convince them to call to the gate and let them know that we
would eventually be there.  Unfortunately, the bag that was being searched
also contained our passports and boarding passes, so we could not send
one of us ahead to try and get some VAT back.  The whole departure
process from this airport is very poorly designed--as an Industrial
Engineer I was appalled, and could see several ways to improve the
processing flow that would serve to sooth the helpless and innocent
traveller.

Speaking of VAT, and the fabled "VAT refund," I believe that it is the
biggest scam yet.  It was so convoluted to get any money back, that I
would rather they say "thanks for visiting, thanks for buying, thanks
for your money, see you next time" instead of "TAX-FREE SHOPPING IN
BRITAIN!!!  GET YOUR VAT DOLLARS BACK!  EASY REFUND!  JUST LOOK FOR THE
DECAL IN SHOPS ACROSS THE COUNTRY!"  What none of the literature or signs
say, is that you have to meet each individual shop's requirements for them
to fill out a voucher for you, and without the voucher you get no refund.
Shops had minimum purchase requirements of 30 or 50 pounds in order for
them to give us a voucher, and the shopkeepers all went quiet as a mouse
when we tried to get any more information from them.  The VAT guy in
the airport, of course commented "well, you have to ask the shopkeepers..."
Sad to say, we did manage to buy enough stuff from one store to get a
voucher, which we then used up the rest of our spare minutes in the airport
trying to get money back.  I ended up dropping the thing in the box,
expecting to never see or hear from it again.  It is a total scam, and
I would rather it just didn't exist--it would probably make and save
lots of money for the country, and as it is figured into all the prices,
I don't think anybody would really notice.

Here is a list of oddities and observations that we noticed as Americans
visiting a strange land:

1.  No washcloths provided in the inns/hotels/B&B's.
        What's the deal here?  Are you supposed to bring your own, or
        just not use them?  We were mystified--we did not bring our own,
        and stopped asking for them on night 2 when our hostess seemed
        completely horrified that we would ask her for some.
2.  Admission prices for everything.  In America, we don't have so many,
    especially in parks, or for nationally owned scenic treasures.  At
    least it seemed so to us.
3.  No bargains to be found anywhere, except for biscuits (crackers) in
    some markets.
4.  No paper shopping bags.  We will bring our own canvas shopping bags
    when next we visit.  It was a surprise to us to see so many of those
    cheap plastic shopping bags being handed out.
5.  Different supply of goods in supermarkets vs. small shops.  We have
    kept some childhood tastes for candy bars that are unavailable in
    the US.  I found it very interesting that only the small shops or
    newsagents had these individual bars (all within 1p of each other)
    and the larger stores did not carry them.

----
Dan McDonald      danm@ether     ...uunet!sequent!ether!danm
Newsgroups: rec.travel