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| The Yorkshire Dales |
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| Abbey ruins |
Two left at the dawn of the day, but two more soon followed. Kenneth and Adam left at an unfortunate 5:30 AM, a few hours later Jon and I left for church, and Renee and Eloi (Jon's cousin and her husband) met us at church with the newly acquired rental car. After the service and the food, we hit the streets. Rather, we hit the wall. We decided a good introduction to the city and a nice way to spend Sabbath afternoon would be to walk the entire two mile circular route of the ancient city walls, enjoying the spring sunshine before enjoying the tasty momos which we made that night.
Sunday we saw York in a day. We went to the 10:00 Easter service at the Minster, which was packed full, where we had the unique opportunity to hear the Archbishop of York preach. We introduced Renee and Eloi to the delights of the English pasty and took them to the Castle Museum before going to Betty's for high tea. After wandering the streets a bit more and showing them the Shambles and town square we took our tired feet home.
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| Lambs! |
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| Talk about narrow roads... |
The next day was our grand adventure. Three Americans and One Catalan were about to brave the English streets in a vehicle, contradicting our natural driving instincts and testing the size limits of a semi-small English car on some very small, narrow one way streets and bridges. We were headed for the Yorkshire Dales and Thirsk. Beautiful country on its own, but also known to be the home and working area of James Harriot, the vet who wrote the well-known books like All Things Bright and Beautiful, and All Creatures Great and Small. To get into the spirit of things, Renee and Eloi had brought the audio books on their ipad and we listened to the stories of James Harriot helping lambs give birth as we wound around the windy country roads, vibrantly green from the fresh grass but covered in the white spots of the countless sheep and baby lambs.
We stopped at the first little village, where we walked around and inside an old abbey, unfinished due to Henry VIII's crazy ideas. We crossed the river on stepping stones, after waiting for some very scared and slow little kids. To be fair though, if my legs were that short I think I would have been scared too. We pressed on and came to the next village, a beautifully picturesque town with fishing lakes all around, rolling green hills, and nature walks, and miscellaneous animals including chickens, goats on houses, geese, bunnies, and lambs wandering around. We had a delicious lunch at a little cafe there, and then realized we better get a move on if we wanted to make it to Thirsk at a decent hour.
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| Crossing the river |
We had originally planned to stop at a large petting farm just outside of Thirsk, but as drove and drove and drove through these tiny roads, where we often had to pull off to the side when other cars came the road was so narrow, we realized we wouldn't make it there before the farm closed. We did also stop briefly since a baby lamb was outside of his gate and we didn't want him to get hit. We pulled over and I ran to his rescue, but when we got to the gate he was safely inside looking pretty smug as I pulled the gate tighter. Good excuse to get better up-close pictures though. We made it to Thirsk, not quite in time to go to the farm, but we walked around a bit and saw James Harriot's old home before heading home to Dutch Blitz, Fluxx, and Wallace and Gromit. Family is now gone, back to just the two of us as we semi-frantically try to finish up assignments that were assigned about 5 weeks ago and were postponed amidst visitors. This time next week we'll be a lot more relieved. We also had phone interviews this morning for a job with the alumni office calling alumni for donations, fingers crossed.
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| Home of James Harriot |
Two left at the dawn of the day, but two more soon followed. Kenneth and Adam left at an unfortunate 5:30 AM, a few hours later Jon and I left for church, and Renee and Eloi (Jon's cousin and her husband) met us at church with the newly acquired rental car. After the service and the food, we hit the streets. Rather, we hit the wall. We decided a good introduction to the city and a nice way to spend Sabbath afternoon would be to walk the entire two mile circular route of the ancient city walls, enjoying the spring sunshine before enjoying the tasty momos which we made that night.
We had originally planned to stop at a large petting farm just outside of Thirsk, but as drove and drove and drove through these tiny roads, where we often had to pull off to the side when other cars came the road was so narrow, we realized we wouldn't make it there before the farm closed. We did also stop briefly since a baby lamb was outside of his gate and we didn't want him to get hit. We pulled over and I ran to his rescue, but when we got to the gate he was safely inside looking pretty smug as I pulled the gate tighter. Good excuse to get better up-close pictures though. We made it to Thirsk, not quite in time to go to the farm, but we walked around a bit and saw James Harriot's old home before heading home to Dutch Blitz, Fluxx, and Wallace and Gromit. Family is now gone, back to just the two of us as we semi-frantically try to finish up assignments that were assigned about 5 weeks ago and were postponed amidst visitors. This time next week we'll be a lot more relieved. We also had phone interviews this morning for a job with the alumni office calling alumni for donations, fingers crossed. 
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