En route to Manchester
It may be York’s influence (and my lack of sleep), but I’m not in the mood for a detailed report. I’ll just say that as I am writing these lines, I am in the first of three trains which I will take to reach Bangor. Normally I’d feel a mix of excitement and panic but…
The problem is that train stations, like airports and ports are liminal spaces. You only stay there for as long as it takes to find a way out of there. They don’t even belong to the city they’re built in since they are gateways to Somewhere Else. And a door is not part of a room.
You can feel it in their air, a mix of impatience, stress, enthusiasm, eagerness. You feel sip in your lungs like bad smoke and making it so much harder to breathe.
En route to Llandudno Junction
Nothing like the cold air on a platform to make you feel better. Traveling has a point for only as long as you keep moving. It will take me a little less than two hours to cover the second third of my trip, during which I will leave England behind m and enter Wales.
Many in-betweens and liminal spaces today. Train stations, mental lines on a map, rivers we cross, clouds playing hide-and-seek with the sun…
Maybe it’s because of the landscape we have crossed so far that I’m such a bad mood: pitch-black tunnels and industrial cities. Call me old-fashioned but I need to be able to look at a stretch of land and read its history. I can’t stand it when the new builds itself with the debris of the old. I want to look at a city and say:
“Here were the walls of the original settlement, these additions were made then, this is a restoration.”
Abbeyfield Hotel
I’m dead on my feet and hungry, but I am in Bangor! Strictly speaking, I am fifteen minutes outside of the city, but who cares? Despite the clouds and the chill on the air, the sun still pokes out every once in a while, even while heading for the western horizon. This last leg of the trip was by far the best. Lush green hills to our left and the seashore to our right. I hadn’t realised how much I had missed the sea until I saw it again.
The hotel is pretty old but the room is spacy and clean. I’ll just relax tonight, what with my head ringing from all the train announcements, I’ll do a bit of a brush up on the university here, and tomorrow (drumroll please!) EXPLORING! I’ll just finish up here and go for dinner. Apparently the pub that is attached to the hotel serves the works. (let’s just hope it doesn’t charge the works as well…)