Family Time!

The hosts outside their home!

Friends we met on the way to the train station

Awesome bookworm outside of John Rylands Library

Lunch at the quirky El Piano!

Walking the wall...

We had approximately three days between our voyage to Greece and when my brother and Adam arrived.  We attempted to use this time to be productive amidst all our Spring Break playing.  Admittedly, we didn't end up accomplishing quite as much as we hoped, I wrote an underwhelming 250 words on my last essay.  But, more importantly, we did make sure the boys had a clean house to stay in and food to eat during their time here!

Yorkshire Gardens

They arrived Thursday morning, and we originally had every intention of meeting them at the arrival gate in the Manchester airport.  Malfunctioning ticket machines at the York train station, 5 missed trains (by only seconds) later, and we met them at the Manchester airport train station, sheepishly and apologetically.  After dropping their bags at luggage storage, we decided to take advantage of the fact that we were already in Manchester and set out to see the city.  Major sights of the day included the Manchester art gallery and the John Rylands library.  Our main reason for stopping at the library was the fact that thanks to our trusty manuscript expert, we became aware of the fact that this particular library housed, among other cool works, the oldest scrap of the New Testament we now possess.  It was a few verses of the gospel of John on papyrus, dating back to approximately 125 AD.  Wow. 

York's Mini Stonehenge? Unconfirmed.

Our noisy campus geese

The next day we set out to show off our spectacular city of York by foot.  Due to two jet-lagged travelers, we got a rather late start, not leaving the house till 2:30 PM, at which point it wasn't really worth it to pay to go to museums that closed at 5:00.   So we saw city center, the outside of the Minster, Clifford's Tower, the Shambles, walked along the old walls, through the Yorkshire Gardens and the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey, walked to the University and showed them around our campuses and the unfriendly ducks and geese that inhabit them, and went to lunch at our favorite eclectic York eatery, El Piano.  

High Tea & Scones at Betty's Tea Room

Kenneth and I at Clifford's Tower

We got a more reasonable start the following day and managed to get to the Minster in time to see the underground section with the layers of different rulers that had inhabited the city and built onto the Minster.  We also saw the treasury and the main level before catching the day's Evensong.  A nice way to close the Sabbath.  This was followed by a walk through the woods behind our house, where we met several of the local horses (and unintentionally lost the guys).  Sunday we finally managed to make it out of the house in time to go to a museum, my favorite museum in fact, the Castle Museum.  We stayed until it closed and they kicked us out, Kenneth quickly snapping pictures as fast as he could as they herded us out the door (a frequent occurrence on any vacation with Kenneth).    We saw the south wing with the period rooms, the two life size replicas of 18th century streets with shops open to wander through.  We continued to the north wing and saw the 60s section, the toy exhibit (with toys ranging from the 16th century to current times), the ancient prison, and military section.  We had just enough time after the museum closed to catch afternoon tea at Betty's Tea Room, the quintessential high class location for excellent British tea and scones with clotted cream and jam, mmmm.  After finishing our tea we headed back through the city square to catch the viking tour, an hour of walking through the city hearing historic tales of Eric Bloodaxe, the last Viking king of York, and his fellow countrymen.