Latest Travels

Went up to North England on Friday night, to Harrogate. Mum was up there visiting a friend so decided to crash their party for the weekend.

Yorkshire was very beautiful, lots of field of differing shades of green separated by dry rock walls built by hand hundreds and hundreds of years ago, that’s talent. Its very difficult still, to get your head around that some of the buildings were built before the first white person settled in New Zealand.

The roads are exactly out of a movie with the narrow lanes (just wide enough to fit a smart car down them) and walls on either side covered in climber… me sitting in the back of the car in a state of hysteria in case we meet any oncoming cars… of which we did, and several tractors!!!

It was a great day out in the Yorkshire dales visiting little villages and seeing the country side, complete with the traffic jam due to on coming … sheep!

I had my very first bank holiday on Monday… now nothing until Christmas!! *sigh* But Mum and I did a day tour to Windsor Castle, Bath and Stonehenge. HUGE day with not enough time spent at any of the destinations, but was great if you needed to jam it all into one day. But going to have to go back…

Windsor Castle is a great place the town seems to be very quaint, although it was a bit of a blur as we raced through it to get to the castle. The castle itself is kinda what I expected, lots of portraits of creepy looking people and their animals and dead animals in one case… go figure?? Fair amount of gaudy gilt, all very ostentatiousness. Quite a bit of gold, in the form or cups and statues, plus some amour and lots and lots and lots of weapons mounted on high walls, muskets, swords, etc etc

Then onto Bath, another lovely town, but with no time to see it… we went through the Bath House, now museum, which was very interesting to see how the Romans laid it all out utilizing the hot springs, lead floors and all! Bet that was healthy.

After Bath we ventured onto Stonehenge. I always thought it would be in this huge field and you can’t see it till you walk over a grassy knoll and it appears magnificently on the horizon. In reality it is in a field, but is flanked by two semi-major highways, which you drive past Stonehenge to get to the parking lot on the other side of the road. Don’t get me wrong it is spectacular and to be able to wander around these huge rocks for about an hour is amazing but the amount of traffic driving past is crazy, not to mention they are endangering the foundations of the Stones. The vibrations from the traffic are moving the stones and putting them at risk of falling. They propose to build a tunnel (which create more vibration) and make people walk 2 miles to get to Stonehenge hence creating my ‘walking over the grassy knoll to see it on the horizon’ view! NICE :)

Back to work this week with a day off on tomorrow to spend some time with Mum before she flies out tomorrow night.

CU