youth hostel

Remembering the fun I had had when staying in youth hostels in my younger days, I decided to introduce hostelling to my family.

We started with a couple of weekend trips, to Snowdonia and London respectively.  And then for this year’s summer holiday – having found all usual self-catering facilities either fully-booked or astronomically expensive – I booked a six-bed room in a youth hotel at Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales.  This cost around £600 for the week (that was with a 10% member discount, and a further 5% discount for including someone under the age of 26 in the party).  Now, where can you get views like this for that price?  A hotel up the road was charging as much per night!

[Read more…] about Youth Hostelling then and now – part 2

Many years ago, at the tender age of 12 or 13, my friend and I stood outside a youth hostel, slightly confused by the notice that said it didn’t open until 7.  We’d thought it opened at 5.  Soon the warden came outside to welcome us: “you don’t have to wait out here, boys, come on in”.  We’d made the schoolboy error (well, we were schoolboys) of reading “1700 hrs” as “7.00 pm”!

This was our first trip to a youth hostel.  We’d cycled, well, nearly twenty miles, to Greens Norton and this was a taster to see whether we could cope with a longer trip in the summer. [Read more…] about Youth Hostelling then and now – part 1