Wanderung 25

Weather:

Expect rain if you travel to Great Britain and take good rain gear! Our rain gear was minimally adequate for light showers and really was not up to the heavy, soaking rains we experienced in the Lake District, Wales, and Bergen. The coats we purchased in Lerwick seemed to be much better quality and were guaranteed waterproof plus breathable, an important consideration if you end up hiking in rain gear like we found ourselves doing.

Money:

Take some kind of credit, debit, or bank card that will allow you to get cash from an ATM! Some of the B&B proprietors do not accept credit cards, so it is critically important to have enough cash to pay your bill at the end of your stay. Some of the ATMs in Great Britain charge fees but many do not. Furthermore, it is never certain that the system used by your particular bank will work on a particular ATM you find on your travels. Finally, some ATMs had very small limits to the cash one could withdraw on a given day. So all in all, it pays to keep an eye open for ATMs as you are wandering around the villages and towns and try them out for getting regular infusions of cash.

Electricity:

All of Europe, including Great Britain, operates on a 220-240 volt AC basis, but Great Britain has a huge, distinctive, and ungainly three-prong plug that is unlike anything used anywhere else in the world. We took along a simple adaptor to be able to plug in the standard American 2-blade plugs. It worked fine but was not fused and did not accommodate the more modern American 2-blade plus grounding prong type of plug. At a Saturday market in Porthmadog, Wales, however, I found a better adaptor that plugged into a British outlet, was fused at 13 amps, and would accommodate either the older or more modern type of U.S. plug (as well as German and Australian 220-volt plugs: see picture).

The information stamped on the back indicates that this adapter was made by "Lloytron" and the model number is either "A134" or "BS5733", as both of those numbers were stamped on the back. Once you have plugged this type of adapter into a wall outlet, you can plug into it a good-quality multiple-outlet splitter with standard U.S. sockets to be able to plug in at least 3 things at once, which was all we ever needed. I say "good quality" and that is critical because the splitter will be handling 240 volts and you must be certain that it can do so safely. You must also be very sure that your electronic devices are capable of handling 220-240 volts (and that the outlet's switch is turned "on"), but all of the e-equipment we have purchased since 2000 has had dual 120 and 240-volt capability.

Footwear:

I used the "1-pair" approach to footwear for this journey. That is, I found a pair of black New Balance 461 athletic shoes that I hoped would suffice for both the extensive hiking in the countryside that we planned in Great Britain and the formal dress occasions that we knew would occur on the Crown Princess. On previous trips I had taken along separate pairs of shoes for each purpose, but when one has size 13 feet like I do, each extra pair of shoes comes at a considerable expense of both weight and bulk. The "1-pair" approach was successful, but just barely. That is, my athletic shoes were just barely adequate for the hiking on rough, stony paths in the Lake District and Wales; true hiking boots would have been far better both for protecting the soles of my feet and for walking through the puddles, streams, and moors that lay in our path. On the other hand, my black athletic shoes also just barely passed muster for the formal occasions on the Crown Princess (patent leather footwear would be much more normal). After walking through the mud and muck of the farms and fields, I had to bring my shoes up to scratch for formal use by soaking them with black shoe dye, which I had fortuitously found at a flea market in Wales.

Monika adopted a "2-pair" solution, but where one of the pairs was disposable at the end of the trip. She had a pair of athletic shoes for walking and a pair of black formal shoes for formal nights. The athletic shoes were old and easily discarded on our last day on the ship, although what our room steward Reyno thought of that I cannot imagine.

Navigation:

For goodness sake purchase a GPS (British: "Sat Nav") that includes maps for Great Britain if you are going to drive there! You can rent one from the car rental agencies for an exorbitant fee, but if you are going to go to Great Britain more than once, I think it would be cost-effective to purchase a unit that covers the British Isles and Europe. My Garmin unit covered both Great Britain and western Europe and worked perfectly during the first part of Wanderung 25 where we were driving around. It also had maps of everyplace we stopped EXCEPT Greenland and the Faroe Islands. If you take a cruise ship to exotic ports like those, your very first move when you disembark should be to ask for a decent map of the area from the Information folks on shore. We found the maps offered by the local folks were always superior to the maps offered by the cruise line, and a decent map plus a good compass will help you navigate around most foreign cities.

But the most important lesson was that the northern route across the North Atlantic Ocean, although fraught with bad weather, rough seas, and even icebergs, offers some of the most interesting places we have ever had the chance to visit. Although you can arrange a layover on Icelandic Air Lines to see Iceland, the only feasible way to see the other ports we visited is by cruise ship. So consider taking a cruise ship on a trans-Atlantic crossing some day and seeing some of the odd northern corners of the globe!