This Week in Vacation Planning (06/28/23)

Rather than bore everyone on Facebook incessently talking about my travel (DID YOU KNOW I’M GOING TO THE UK NEXT SUMMER????) I thought I’d do a category of posts here on the blog, talking about how I’m working things out for the vacation. This post is about three things; I’m on the hunt for a new toiletry bag, I may have found the “See Rock City” of England, and how many distilleries is “too many” to visit?

What is the deal with hanging toiletry bags? When was the last time you were in a hotel bathroom that had a place from which to hang a toiletry bag that (a) was long enough to keep the bag open (b) wasn’t also the place you have to hang your towel, washcloth, and any clothes you’ve hand-washed that need to hang to dry and (c) then remain open to show everyone else in your room or who comes to see your room what you brought with you?

I have a hanging toiletry bag and I’ve hated it since the first time I used it.

According to my recent reading of everything on travel blogs, this is pretty standard. Ugh. I hate it. It’s too long to hang from a towel rack in a bathroom, it always either hits the toilet or the counter, depending on which hook I’m using. I don’t like the little bag slots, nothing I have is the right size. I don’t like the one big-ass pocket that you can (great) shove a lot of stuff into but then (boo) never find and you have to empty the whole damn thing. But because it’s so long, I also can’t just keep it open on the counter, because it’ll take up most of the room. I usually zip it shut and shove it in the corner of the counter. Oh, and see that awesome, large front pocket? You can never fit anything into it because everything else that’s already in the bag juts out so much, there’s no room left in that little pocket (unless you’re putting very flat things, like papers).

Also, I’m a completely spoiled bitch and if I’m travelling for five or six weeks, I’d like a full sized bottle of shampoo and conditioner, please and thank you. That’s not going to fit in this. Oh, what’s that? Put it separately in the suitcase? Then why have a toiletry bag? Also, I’ve done that before and in a soft-side bag, it tends to get squashed and then you have shampoo over everything in your bag. Good times. (Stay tuned for another post later on finding a new suitcase.)

I think I’ve found the Rock City of England. I give you… The Forbidden Corner. A garden labyrinth. Buildings. Tunnels. Follies. Allegedly you can see the whole sweet silly place in about two hours, which tells me it’s not huge (and maybe not worth going out of our way for), but HOW CAN I RESIST THAT BUILDING?! Also, it’s in the Yorkshire Dales, so if I want to do any sort of All Creatures/James Herriot thing, it would be right there.

Forbidden Corner; CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Y’all. THAT BUILDING. What a nightmare inducing spectacle! If I can’t go there, can I at least build something like it on my property??? I alternately want to run and hide from that, and give it a big hug.

One last thing…

There are over 130 active whisky distilleries in Scotland? And you can tour most, if not all, of them? Well how am I supposed to narrow THAT down?! Did I say this trip was going to be five weeks? Maybe I meant five months. There’s really too many fun things that I apparently, suddenly, need to do. There are a handful of them in Glasgow, the one place that I know we’ll be for about six days, for the convention. One of them is within walking distance, it looks like, from the hotel area and convention center8 (the Clydeside Distillery). Hotel rooms haven’t yet opened up for WorldCon but we know the area it’ll be, and I recognize the view out the window as being a little farther up the Clyde than we were when we went in 2005, facing the direction of the hotel we were in then.