Day four, Tuesday- York, Hadrians Wall and a wee bit o Scotland.

Got our wakeup call at 630 and got ready to go, suitcases outside the door and I brought our things down stairs so that we would not have to go back up. Breakfast at 7 of scrambled eggs, beans on toast, fruit and juice and tea of course. Yummy. Dashed across the street to the park to sprinkle M&D in the rose buses. Back for a washroom break and then onto the bus and off to York. Another misty , grey kind of day.

After a pretty uneventful drive of about 30 minutes in quite a bit of traffic we came into York.

 The daffodils were blooming on the grass mounds along the walls that surround the old city. The trees were in bloom where they dropped us off.  through the gate past the park and when we crossed the bridge and I dropped M&D into the Ouse River for them to follow it through new parts of England. Nobody could say that my parents aren’t well travelled. 

Peter kept us going a quite a pace as he rattled off a lot of history about York. Romans, vikings, medieval times. The shambles is a very cool street in York. Our first medieval street and we were duly impressed. only a few shops were open as it was a holiday and we didn't really have time as we only had so much time in york

During the walk to the cathedral York Minster Peter pointed out the home of guy Faulks, a notorious man of his age and told us of how they still celebrate Guy Faulks day by burning his effigy on big bonfires in towns and villages all over the country. he was part of a plot to blow up parliament. I don't think they have halloween here.

The York Minster is fabulous. Margie and I wandered around the cathedral fro our full allotted time marvelling at the windows, the types of architecture soaking;g it all in. 

York Minster is one of the starting points for the camino to Santiago de Compestella. which I have partly walked. another pilgrimage site. the window says it all.
I picked up a t-shirt, coasters and some postcards in the little gift shop. You could very easily spent 2 or three days in York there is so much to see that we didn’t get to see as we had to move on  to Scotland. Sigh. An excellent reason to come back.

The tour took us through some really stunning countryside. Beautiful fields of yellow canola, green grass, hedgerows, farms and villages. So picturesque that sometimes it just took your breath away. There were sheep of course with wee lambs, so cute. We must have seen a thousand sheep. Very large old trees in the middle of fields and the farther north we went there were fewer and fewer leaves on the trees.

 At 1215 we were at Scotch corner and there was construction along the way. By 1230 it was raining between Darlington and Neam Castle. We had a comfort break at a Macdonalds and the stop was only 4 minutes and 24 sec long. We went through the edge of town and as we were driving down the road, Peter pointed out the stone wall on the boulevard separating the roads as part of Hadrian’s wall. I thought if that is all I get to see of Hadrian’s wall then I am going to be unhappy. 

A little bit later we stopped in Hedon on the Wall at the Swan pub (there are a lot of Swan Pubs in great Britain) for lunch, a very tasty veggie soup and egg salad sandwich and 2 beer, the old speckled hen and a local brew Wylam. Both were pretty good.

Peter started telling us about the area and books about Hadrian’s wall -Rosemary Sutcliffe being one novelist with a good one, 7 eagles I think. 

We went to the post office where I picked up some postcards and stamps and then we went for a walk through the town past a medieval church(11th C I think), down a road with a roman name, through a little gate and down a hedge lined path to Hadrian’s wall. I was so excited I jumped on to it and jumped up and down. Peter was giving all of the adults a nice talk about the wall but the young boy and I were walking on the wall. The wall disappeared into the mist as it was quite thick and there were some horses in the field next to the wall. The wall was only about 3 feet high and 4 feet wide but it was there. Over the centuries many parts of the wall were dismantled completely and the stone reused to build farm houses , churches, barns and walls between fields. That any of it survived at all is really a marvel, but it did. Living History if you can call stone walls living. There is a path that you can actually hike all along Hadrian’s wall right across the country. How cool would that be.

Back on the bus to Scotland the home of Peter. Peter entertained us with some fun things like how to talk like Sean Connery, some misty music, and telling us about his home town, a small place that we would not be stopping in but that he liked very much.

the lambs up north are just being born and they are so small compared to what we had seen so far. 

the highlands look quite barren but Peter says to come back in the fall with the heather is purple not brown like it was now. We stopped at the English/Scottish Border for a photo op  and happily did the obligatory stand with one Foot in each. The cattle here are sometimes those little long haired big horned red ones. The terrain is very rocky with cliffs and pheasant, llamas, primrose, daffodils and the oldest tree. 

We did a quick comfort stop at Jedburgh abbey ruins from the year 1138. One of the many victims of Henry the 8’s closing of the monasteries. 

At 5:10 we passed the road to Rosalind chapel from the Davinci code. They use to get up to 20,000 visitors then a year after the Davinci code it went up to 180,000 and were not really ready for that .

At 6:00 we arrived at our hotel outside of Edinburgh, Norton House Hotel. A really nice manor house converted into a Spa hotel. Our room was lovely and this shower did not give Margie such a hard time. We did not have a lot of time before dinner.

We were piped into dinner by Andrew our 6’.8” piper and I had a very tasty vegetarian haggis, I have to find the recipe for that. All the food was excellent. The Clappy Do’s entertained us after dinner music, songs and dancing. I bought the CD as they were fun.

Margie and I went to the pool at 845. A marvellous hydrotherapy pool with a waterfall to massage your back and shoulders. Out of the pool by 10 and I think both of us slept very well. Edinburgh tomorrow.