York -- The Fast Tour

Jane's Journal Page Notes:
Dare Your Self

...To sleep outside,
Sleep under the stars,
Sleep naked and alone,
on a cliff edge,
outside -- alone,
I dare you!

Journal entry:
WHAT HILLS! Durham has hills, Lincoln has gently rising and falling terrain!

Wait! I should back up:

We did manage to get up around 6:30, but didn’t get to the breakfast room till 7:45, which meant we didn’t leave until after 9:00. Oh well. We didn’t even have time to check for the confirmation email re Elizabeth's train ticket. She’s got the full-blown cold now: runny nose, congestion, sore throat.

The drive to York was fine. It’s not too far from Lincoln (all of these drive times are around two hours so far), but York is a City, where Lincoln is a city. We had no trouble with directions, thanks to Daphne, and found both the train station and a parking places quite easily. I was astounded at how many open parking spots there were! Walked into the train station and Elizabeth had her ticket in about 4 minutes! No queue, no waiting. Just walk up to a machine, do the magic the internet instructed her to do, and Hey presto!

I picked up a guidebook and map at the Tourist Information Center at the train station and off we all trotted off towards the minster, stopping for lunch at a pub--the oldest licensed pub in York. Ye Olde Starre Inn. It said we'd be able to see the minster, but it was barely visible, even if the neighbors had kept their bushes and vines trimmed back. But we all had nice sandwiches in the sun.

We continued wandering the streets, eventually finding to the Shambles. This is the famous tourist trap of York, where the houses are built out on the upper floors so that they nearly meet over the street. We bought dishtowels and fudge (what a weird combination, but the linens were over 50% off!). Then we had to take Elizabeth back to catch her train. We got her on the right train, but as it pulled out of the station, we realized she was on the wrong car. Hopefully it all works out!!

Then we headed back across town, inside the old city walls, to the minster. Since we got there around 3:30, we really didn’t have time for much more than a quick-step wander through it. The Chapter House was the coolest bit again, different from Lincoln’s in design. The choir and organ were warming up for Evensong. At 4:30, the Dean (or a stand-in) came over the loudspeaker and asked us to quiet ourselves. She then did a nice long, probably canned but very heartfelt prayer for the world, and for us visitors. What a warm feeling it was looking up afterward at the North Transept windows and thinking about all the other people through the centuries who have also prayed here.

We walked the city walls...well, just one stretch of them. Lovely views into people‘s back gardens and across the city. We had to head back to the car then because it was rush hour and time to head north to Durham. In spite of our traffic fears, we had no problems getting out of York. I guess we were going the 'wrong' direction. The drive across to Durham on the A1 was uneventful. We made it in just over an hour, but then spent twenty minutes driving around the neighborhood of our lodgings because we didn’t have a complete address to give Daphne. She got us to the intersection, but we couldn’t figure it out from there.

The problem is that this intersection looks like a simple three-street intersection. Actually, there are 'streets' that parallel two of the main streets, so we really have a intersection of six streets, build on a hillside. It’s hard to explain. Our 'guest house' is right at the end of one of these subsidiary streets, with its name written over the door in four-inch script. Impossible to see from the main street, which is about a 9% grade, and goes one-way the wrong direction to boot!

ANYWAY. We found the place eventually. I went in to be sure our room was still available. I had told the owner we’d be there between six- and seven-o-clock. By now it was close to 7:30. She told me we were late. Should have taken a clue from that, eh? I think she’s just brusque (and not in a good way); she did explain the parking passes we had to have in the car while we were there, and gave me our key with no big fuss.

Beast was in melt-down having been trying to back into a parking spot going the wrong way down a steep hill, with a manual transmission, only to find the rear tires resting on glass. We had to truck up the hill again with our suitcases in tow (we packed light, but we still had two small bags and a bigger one, along with his computer bag).

As we went up the stairs, the proprietess said, "It does seem as if the people with the most luggage always end up with rooms all the way up the stairs." Ugh. Of course we do: that's where the bigger rooms are!

The room is nice, but quite literally half the size of the one in Lincoln. Sparky’s in a folding bed stuffed in between Beast’s bed and the desk. I’m in the corner. There is one window, over Sparky’s bed. The floors creak and the bathroom is small (shock, eh?) but nice. There is a closet to put our bags in, thank God, or we’d really be SOL.

Let me just say: Castle View Guest House is tight quarters, but great location. Out the door, down past St. Margaret’s Church to the river, back up the other bank (past a Pizza Hut, sigh) and you are in the old city. Which is the route we took looking for dinner. It was now 8:00. The town had buttoned up completely. Nothing was open (well, except Pizza Hut and the pubs). We ended up eating in the very back of a decent pub called The Marketplace (on the market square, oddly enough), where they fed us, but warned us that Sparky wasn’t really meant to be in there after 5 or 6. Oh, well, it was decent enough food, not spectacular, but we were awfully hungry. And they were nice about it, since I’m sure their license could be yanked.

We took a quick walk up to the cathedral after eating and wandered around the lawn outside of it. Peered into the castle grounds (which are part of Durham University, so private property and closed completely to tourists after about 5 p.m.). Instead of walking all the way back to the marketplace and down to the river from there, we instead found a back alley that twisted its way down to Framwelgate Bridge. Very creepy, but we ran into no one at all. It was just dusk as we reached the bridge, the pubs were cranking up along the river there, and we headed back here to bed.

It’s nearly 11. There is rain forecasted for tomorrow. Drag.