Bang! The bed collapsed! The head of the bed had fallen about 18 inches. The foot of the bed was still in place. We, the bed, and the bedding were in disarray. There had been no acrobatics, we had been quietly reading our electronic devices. Karen suggested that we might just switch around so that our heads would be at the high end and feet at the low. But that was not a solution. We checked the sofa in the living room. It had a fold out bed. But it was worse than the one at my parent’s place, which had been awful. Karen went downstairs to find Jan. Jan was out of the building. But she left a note with a phone number. She was across the street with her mother.
Jan came over right away. She was great, no excitement, no attempt to blame us, just very calm. We mentioned the sofa bed. She vetoed that idea immediately. She had one room unoccupied that night and sent us to that one. She said that these were new beds and didn’t understand what happened but would have her maintenance guy look at the next day. We slept very well that night.
The Victoria House starts serving breakfast at 8:00 am, Trevor was going to arrive to pick us up at 9:00 so we went down for breakfast promptly. The breakfast room was large. There were a number of tables, most set for two people with white linen table cloths and real china. The hot breakfast was basically your “full English breakfast” but you could order what items you wanted, one or two eggs, one or two bangers, no black sausage, and so on. The buffet included a variety of juices and cold cereal. In all it was nicely elegant and the food was excellent. We grabbed the table in the bay window. Very nice!
Trevor arrived to pick us up at 9:00. Before we left Jan said that he hoped to have the bed fixed by the time we returned. As it happened the bed was fixed. The problem seemed to have been that a center vertical support for mattress had been knocked awry by the cleaning folks when tried to move the bed to clean around it. This was put back in place and the bed was good to go. We had no further problems. Just to be clear – Victoria House was great and we would not hesitate to stay again!
We took off with Trevor. He took us onto the island of Anglesey and across the Menai Straight into Snowdonia (as I wrote, places are not very far apart in this area). One of the things that we got from Trevor was some tips on driving in Wales, particularly the rules for entering and leaving a roundabout. The traffic in a roundabout flows clockwise. Traffic coming from the right has the right away. Once you are in the roundabout, you have right away over anyone else entering it. There are often two lanes of traffic in the roundabout. If you are going to leave at the first or second exit you should stay in the outer lane otherwise move to the inner lane. The exits are pretty well marked. It looked a piece of cake when Trevor was driving!
Many of the roads were narrow. The narrowness was accentuated by a low curb and a stone wall. It was much like driving on a freeway right next to a construction barrier. As long as there were only the typical, fairly compact sedans on the road it wasn’t too bad. Until you encountered a bus or a lorry. There was probably “plenty” of room but it didn’t seem that way. Then you come up behind someone on a bicycle. This would be particularly exciting/aggravating when on a winding mountain road in Snowdonia. Being cautious tourists, the traffic would back up behind us.
The driver had to really focus on his driving so it was essential to have a navigator to interpret the navigation system, look for road signs, and call out the exits on the roundabouts. This is where my scheme to have Karen explore on her own while I was fishing fell apart.
Some pictures are at: https://goo.gl/photos/UzXb1e3GEhhNGMaTA