by Mick Rhodes | editor@claremont-courier.com

One sunny spring afternoon in 2017, while scrolling through my Facebook page (RIP), I had a transient ischemic attack. It’s sort of a mini-stroke. One minute I was scrolling, the next I could not recognize anything I was seeing. Words were unreadable. Letters seemed scrambled. It was terrifying.

My first glimpse at a Welsh roadway sign was a little like that.

“Gwernymynydd.” “Tafarn-y-Gelyn.” “Bodelwyddan.” “Llanfairfechan.” And the coup de grace, “Llanfairpwilgwyngyll.”

Every sign looked like the worst set of Scrabble tiles I’d ever seen.

Thankfully the brain teasing signs were accompanied by some gorgeous green countryside as my wife Lisa and I drove across England and Wales these past few weeks.

It all began April 3 with a couple days in chaotic London, followed by a couple more up in Liverpool hanging out with some of Lisa’s super-fun family in their back garden personal pub. Yes, they have their own pub. I really like them.

Next, we headed south to Wales. Our first stop was Conwy, where we checked into the circa-12^th century Castle Hotel. Lisa chose it weeks earlier because it looked so charming online. And it really was; our room was up two flights of narrow stairs, down a few more, then up again, on floor 2-1/2. It had a little door about 5 feet tall. I had to duck to get in.

One of my wife’s many wondrous qualities is that she is quite sensitive to the spirit world. And, the Castle Hotel, we later learned, is one of the most haunted hotels in Wales.

Oops.

She slept a few hours each of the two nights we were there. It was just too psychically loud in our room. I slept fine. The hereafter doesn’t find me interesting, apparently. With Lisa dragging a little, we headed south to Caernarfon to see if she could get some sleep there. No dice. The 16^th century Black Boy Inn was just as, um, spirited.

So we ambled further southward, unsure of our destination. And it was one of the most beautiful drives I’ve ever made. We drove up and through Eryri National Park, with its undulating vibrant green hills and canyons, all manner of flora, streams, rivers, alternating between heavily wooded and wide open, dramatic vistas of farmlands separated by centuries old rock mound fences. Just incredible. We rolled through little towns with tiny homes that seemed to have been created for tiny medieval folk. It was peak calving season so there were thousands of lambs following their mothers around, hopping and running, testing their new legs.

We stopped to coffee up in Machynlleth, which was reminiscent of 1980s Claremont, replete with hippies, natural products, a great little record store, and vegan food everywhere. We then continued on to Aberystwyth, a seaside college town. After a pub dinner with a crowd cheering on a Newcastle vs. Manchester United match, we took a walk on the beach then picked up a bottle of Australian shiraz from the hotel bar and drained it slowly, watching the sun set over the Irish Sea.

We said goodbye to beautiful Wales the next morning and headed on to Exmouth, England, the northern tip of the Jurassic Coast, a breathtaking World Heritage Site. It stretches 96 miles along the English Channel, and is renowned as the only place on Earth where rocks from the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods exist together in one place, spanning 185 million years of Earth’s history. Lisa has wanted to see it for years.

The next day we checked into the Royal Lion Hotel in Lyme Regis, where despite the pouring rain, Lisa combed the beach for fossils. The next morning we continued down the coast, first to Charmouth, then to Bridport, where we sat on a bench and sipped flat whites, soaking up the sun and the cool breeze blowing in off the English Channel. Heavenly.

With the wife’s Jurassic jones sated, we decided on a whim to go see Bath. I knew nothing about the town. Lisa knew just that parts of one of her fave shows, Bridgerton, were filmed there. It was spectacular. Hotel Indigo was above our pay grade, a little posh, but we figured we might as well treat ourselves to some mod cons like elevators and fancy cocktails. We walked all over the city, took a guided Bridgerton tour, ate great food, and misbehaved.

We were about 15 days in at this point. As such, who could blame my lovely wife, she of saint-level patience, when, after all that driving around the U.K. with my constant need for food, attention, coffee, bathrooms, and driving directions, she let a little frustration slip through? “Nobody” is the correct answer. We were returning to the Indigo after a long day and night. I had some trouble getting the door open with the key card, and, like the great Nelson Muntz, she uttered a quick, sarcastic, and telling, “Ha-ha.” I certainly deserved the jab after so many days of my OCD weirdness. Touché!

I had some reservations about this trip. I worried how Lisa would be treated returning to the U.S. with her U.K. passport and Green Card, and over my own re-entry, as legal U.S. residents are being disappeared for protesting against the war in Gaza, and even for standing up against our unhinged president. We needn’t have worried. The customs agent asked Lisa how long she had been in the U.K., her address in the U.S., and if she had any fruit. My droopy-eyed agent asked if I was bringing back more than $10,000 in goods (I wasn’t) and that was that.

And if you’re wondering what regular folks in the U.K. think about Trump, I am here to report not much. We engaged with all sorts of people in pubs, hotels, restaurants, museums, on trains and in Ubers, and bloke to lass, the reviews were universally unflattering. One geezer in Conwy asked me,  “Have you lost your f&%$ing minds over there?” This was the general consensus. My answer was always a variation on, “Why, yes. Yes we have.”

Dirty Opera

Claremont filmmaker, musician and songwriter Dimitri Coats, local musician, record label owner and author Dennis Callaci, and artist and Pitzer College Assistant Director of Production for Media Studies Eddie Gonzalez have formed a nonprofit, Dirty Opera, and will be curating an ongoing series of film, music, and art events in the Pomona Valley. The first, a screening of John Carpenter’s darkly comedic, politically subversive 1988 horror/thriller “They Live,” followed by a Q&A with artist/activist Shepard Fairey and bestselling author, MacArthur “Genuis” and Pomona College creative writing professor Jonathan Lethem, is happening at 7:30 p.m. next Tuesday, April 29 at Laemmle Claremont 5. The event was very nearly sold out at press time, but you can try your luck at laemmle.com.