Yorkshire Dales

If we had to choose our favorite day from this trip, I think it would be a tough call between our tour of Suffolk villages and the drive through the Yorkshire Dales. I don't have the energy for a thousand words, so I'll make do with a few photos. And yes, it really is that green.

Cold Night in Whitby

It was a sad leave-taking from West Stow Hall, it had been a brilliant week and we would truly miss our hosts and Suffolk. It was a long drive north with serious travel delays and rain showers. But as we eventually reached the smaller roads of the North York Moors we cheered up. Sheep in every direction makes for a pleasant way to travel, and a quick but exciting stop in Scarborough when we hit the coast made us anxious for our eventual destination - Whitby.


Whitby..... Mecca to England's Goth community and the town where Bram Stoker's Dracula first came ashore. The site of the imposing gothic abbey ruins as you approach from the south is as striking as one's first sight of Stonehenge.

We were thrilled and excited, but most of all we were tired and cold and hungry. So we dumped our luggage in our little B&B in the heart of Old Whitby and braved the freezing cold blustery winds to find Hadleys - highly recommended as being just as good as the much more famous Magpie but with shorter lines. I doubt that there were any lines at The Magpie - not many tourists about - we just knew that Hadleys was much closer.

We were greeted warmly and served speedily - I was even allowed to substitute mushy peas for the chips with my Whitby Prawns. All of our meals were really excellent, but when the last bit was cleaned from our plates, we were faced with a real dilemma - Sticky Toffee Sponge or Treacle Sponge. Since we had pledged ourselves to no more than one desert split three ways per meal on this trip, it was left to me to decide.

I opted for the Sticky Toffee Sponge, it was a good choice.

Today we will explore the Old Town, shop for a piece of jet jewelry, and visit the Abbey. It is still bitterly cold and they are posting wind warnings, but I figure it will only add to the atmosphere of this wonderful old fishing town.

Rare Welsh Bits

A few random bits from the 1986 Journal as we traveled through Wales:

• We had about three hours to kill so we walked around Welshpool.  It did have quite a few nice half-timbered buildings, but the shops were all geared to the mainstream tourists of low mentality.  We figured that we had logged about 50 plus hours of serious tourist shopping in some of the finest shops in England and we were above the likes of genuine Welsh slate with the Serenity Prayer etched on it.    
• We have decided that we must make a patchwork quilt that looks just like the Welsh countryside.  It will be all in various shades of green, with embroidery in brown and green for the hedgerows and trees, and lots of white French knots for all the sheep.  Then when you lie underneath it and make bumps, you will have the hills.
• While we were dressing before breakfast, we had laughed at the sheep bleating so loudly for their breakfast, or so we assumed.  With our windows onto the pasture wide open, they were incredibly noisy.  They have so many different voices, and some of them are so rude, that we had great fun trying to imitate them.  When we mentioned it at breakfast, we found out the real reason for all the noise – the first batch of lambs were taken from their mothers this morning and sent to market.  Boy, did we feel foolish…and somehow guilty.

Anglophile…Anglomaniac…Anglonerd

I had been on a Henry VIII reading binge for months and it was spreading forward into Elizabeth I and other Tudor history.  At the same time I was becoming really interested in plants and gardening – because of climate similarities, most of my research led me to English gardens and gardeners.

Alone on my patio one sunny summer morning in 1984, I thought about my brother in Germany (for a year), my mother traveling in Europe (three weeks), and my daughter touring Europe with a girlchoir.  I had never been further away than Indianapolis!  Not fair, I thought, this has got to change.

Pondering the logistics of a single woman and 14 yr old daughter traveling in a foreign country led me to the inescapable conclusion that England – with no language barrier, no summer heat & a reasonable rate of exchange – was the perfect destination.

In the heart of Salisbury, Wiltshire

And it turned out that it was.

That first trip to England was perhaps the most wonderful three weeks of my life.  Absolutely nothing went wrong or dissappointed.  We even had some exceptionally good food!?!  I felt a deep and warm connection with everything I saw and I fell hopelessly in love with all things English.  This vacation also took what had been a good mother-daughter relationship to a whole new level of communication and enjoyment.  We added a deeper level of friendship that has lasted us through as many trips to England as we could afford over the years.

Some very good English food at Lewis's Tea Room in Tintagel, Cornwall

This love affair has now carried over into most facets of my life and if you read this blog long enough, you will find out more about England than you ever thought you would.



Sheep and standing stones in Amesbury, Wiltshire