Favorite vacation places/times/holidays?

You'll need to be quick. Some of my favourite places in the country are now covered with malls and McDonalds and hypermarkets. As a kid, my town had about a dozen fish and chip shops. They've all gone. If you see fish and chips on a takeaway menu, it's there as an anachronism. The fish comes out of a packet, isn't battered, and the chips are French fries. Proper English pubs are getting rarer too. Chains of bars are more common offering an homogenised experience. The only cobbles that remain are back alleys that nobody uses. Our culture is being supplanted. It's "progress". Supposably.

The history remains, though. I'm a castle nut but there are some amazing things aside from that. Underground roads and cities, for instance. My city has underground streets from another age. Not a lot of residents know, or care. In Edinburgh, there's a street which was pretty much submerged in the 1600's because of the plague. The residents were left to die. It's open again now and is amazing. It's not a recreation of the 1600's. It's the actual 1600's. The small town I grew up in had Tudor buildings still going strong, and there are stone circles and standing stones all over the place that are up to 5,000 years old. Most of us ignore it as part of the furniture but I love it and feel privileged.

And then there's the cliffs and the coastline. There are some amazing places in the world but the west coast of the UK (Cornwall, south-west Wales, the islands of Scotland) are beyond beautiful. Anyone who comes here just to see Big Ben and Buckingham Palace is missing out on so much. I'm not patriotic at all (nobody here is) but I do realise the natural beauty and the historic beauty we have here. I'll be up in York in three weeks time (Google images of York pretty much sum up the York I have in my mind's eye) and I can't wait to get back there.