England - York

It is with great pleasure that I return to travel-themed posts. I won't finish off our honeymoon all at once, but would like to work through the places I haven't yet blogged about before I forget too many specific details.

York has been mentioned twice before, but both times in the context of food posts. York city was, of course, where we found Goji Cafe and its wonderful vegan liquorice cake. The Yorkshire Dales National Park provided incredible scenery for the consumption of some of my London food purchases, in an outing that ranked as one of my favourite activities for the trip.

Yorkshire dales. I could happily teleport here now, just so you know.

Yorkshire was our first driving destination, after we collected a hire car on our last morning in London. We drove via Lincoln, itself a beautiful town, and I remember the giddying pride when I parked our manual hire car in a Lincoln car park after a smooth stretch of motorway driving (with, I might add, Mr Bite asleep and thus no use whatsoever for driving directions).

This isn't the Lincoln car park, but it is a picture of the car

I learnt to drive on a manual car, and have a manual license, but have driven an automatic for the past five years. Although Mr Bite drives a manual, which I do drive on occasion, this is the first trip where I have allowed us to hire a manual for holiday driving. I have terrible fears of stalling in busy intersections and/or failing to achieve a hill start on a steep hill, with angry drivers building up behind me. Neither of these scenarios have ever occurred, but I sense that I have the capacity to get there!

Happily, the car proved its worth and I neither stalled nor rolled backwards down hills. Our old Nokia mobile phone with its free, no data required mapping service also allowed us to navigate relatively problem-free. If only the Nokia maps would go on our newer Android mobile phones, we would be able to avoid carrying three mobile phones with us - but that is a topic for another time (or, perhaps, not really a topic at all).

Lincoln cathedral, Lincoln

In Lincoln, we explored the outside of the cathedral and the inside of the old castle, and had a very late lunch in a traditional teashop, complete with pretty china for my tea. Being close to 3pm, I jumped over lunch protocol and ordered a fruit teacake (or English muffin as I would have been inclined to call it), while Mr Bite went with a more typical lunch choice of a baked potato.

York itself, when we arrived there, was a beautiful city. We never visited it on my childhood family trips to England, as time constraints led us to drive straight through Yorkshire when heading north. I was really pleased to get there this time.

England was having a very wet start to Autumn, and the York river flooded the day before we arrived. Six months worth of rainfall in one day will do that, I suppose. We were fortunate not to be affected, but the river-front shops and houses were less lucky. The river-front areas of the city also looked a bit different to usual! I hope the affected areas have been able to dry out and get back to normal now.

We had three nights in York and stayed at our only B&B for the trip. It was quintessentially English, complete with a four-poster bed, which was great for novelty if not quite as useful as our self-catering stops. Still, it is the first time I have had the luxury of a four-poster bed to sleep in. Given I had recently finished Phillipa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl, the combination of the room and being in York (a key city in Tudor times) meant that I could almost imagine being back several centuries.

Our first full day in York started with the York cathedral, including its tower. We seemed to spend a lot of time going up things on holiday, including towers and cable cars, and York was our first cathedral climb.

Me disappearing into part two of the cathedral climb...

...and the views from the top

We also visited the railway museum, mostly because it was indoors and warm and free, but it did prove to be worth the visit. The York Castle museum was worthwhile too, and was so large and so well set up that we ran out of time to get through it all. It is located near the castle rather than focusing on it, and covers different eras in Yorkshire history, complete with period-specific displays from the 18th century to the current day and a full interactive Victorian street. Walking the old city walls was another perk of the city.

From York, we also made a day trip to Skipton, which has another castle and is located just off the Yorkshire Dales. Our trip coincided with Skipton's Saturday morning market, which was fun to wander around after visiting the castle area.

Skipton castle

That day incorporated our time in the national park, and I would love to walk more of Yorkshire (and indeed more of England generally) in the future. Yorkshire has a truly amazing array of walking trails, and the locals don't seem to mind if the weather is sub-optimal while they are walking them.

When we left York, we drove north to Durham via Helmsley, a tiny, picturesque town just at the bottom of the North York Moors National Park. It was well worth a driving break and highlights one of the things I love about England - if you drive for an hour in any direction, you are likely to stumble across an attractive town or castle or both.

Hemlsley

From there, we went on to Durham and Newcastle-Upon-Tyne - but we will leave those for another post.

Have you visited York or Yorkshire? 
Or does anyone share my unjustified fears of manual cars (please say yes)?

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