Yorkshire

York is either the biggest nightclub in the west or has a vastly bigger red light district than we thought. Despite the bedazzling (but hopefully not vajazzling) local young women, York is just about the prettiest town we've seen. More like dickensian London than industrial hub, York is full of quaint cobbled laneways with kooky shops and pubs named things like "the slug and lettuce". 

Our hostel is also definitely different. It's clearly been recently refurbished with bold painted street art on the walls. Apparently connected to the bar and restaurant downstairs it seems to be run entirely by hipsters. There's a blacklight on the wall in our room. It makes the fluoro stencil art in our bedroom glow. 

I'm still sick at this point having almost completely lost my voice (the perfect wife, some might say) so we've slowed down a bit in hope that i may recover. 

Yorkshire is home to one of my favourite authors, James Herriot, who wrote stories about his life as a vet in the yorkshire dales in the 1930s. The town he lived and worked in is Thirsk, about an hour north of York. The house from the stories is still there as a museum to James, his work and the BBC series that I think was made in the 80s. After a quick lunch we thought we would head across to a "Folly" garden made a bit like Alice in wonderland before shooting across to Scarborough for the afternoon. Neither of these things happened because Yorkshire buses suck. Even though the garden wasn't that far away there was no bus that went near it and the tourist office couldn't believe that we didn't have a car. They even admitted that they lived in a public transport black hole. So we gave up and caught the bus back to York. 

We did visit Scarborough the next day which is equal parts scenic seaside village and skanky bogan town. The castle is at the pretty end, the station at the other. Apart from reading the bus timetable wrong and waiting for it in the wrong spot it all went rather smoothly. Scarborough castle accounts for nearly 3000 years of history between the Britons, the Romans, the Vikings and the Normans it's been quite a popular destination. Anne bronte is also buried there.
 Our final morning in York we stopped at York castle which is mainly just the Keep or tower on a huge "motte" (huge mound of earth) the motte is so steep, the have to use abseilers to mow the grass. There we also met some Canada geese which decided that the motte was a good place to bring their goslings to much on some turf. Canada geese have very atrractive markings and their young are vy sweet. We also met some more standard farm geese as they decided to halt traffic by standing the middle of the road. I feel i now should have a scout's badge or something for geese herding.

Cymru to you

Wales, or Cymru, was somewhere that we did not see at all last time we visited the UK. So we wanted to make sure that we visited this time. It's very hard to judge where to go when you visit somewhere you've never been, so armed with the sage wisdom of my father, (cities are the same everywhere, there's nothing welsh about Cardiff) we aimed for a small town near the Brecon Beacons national park. Abergavenny (Y fenni) is a small market town with perhaps 1,500 people. We stayed in a rundown pub that rebadged itself as a backpackers to avoid renovations, which was fine by us. About a mile out of town the walk took us around picture perfect views and victorian homes.

The ancient castle ruins stand at the height of the town, with bounding squirrels too fast for our camera. The balmy welsh summer maxed out at 14C with constant rain, so we're pretty glad we ignored most advice about needing shorts and packed the thermals instead. We hadn't expected to be pretty much conpletely devoid of internet service which has caused some rather panicked rain sodden walking through tiny bus-deprived towns hopelessly looking for a touristy steam railway. We found the railway eventually and as soon as we entered it stopped raining, until we went outside again. I'm beginning to think wales resents our presence.

Yesterday we took the sunday bus route which takes carless senior citizens out of their homes to see the countryside. It's a free service for them but for anyone with all their teeth it was £9 each. Not a bad rate for an all day trip around the Brecon Beacons. The weather put on a show for us (14C and rain) so we stayed on the bus with the guided tour. A bit awkward on a full size coach with six people including us, the guide and the bus driver. It was good to see the countryside though, with its rolling hills and sheep with tails.

Today we tried to get up early but with my cold wearing me down i'm getting a bit grumpy. So we got up early-ish to catch the train to oxford for lunch. Of course we would pick graduation day to visit oxford, so all the colleges are closed [grumpgrump]. It's still very pretty though and in parts we nearly saw the sunshine.

Currently we're on the train to York (yay for free wireless on first class carriages) and onward to the land of James Herriot.

The Honey's honeymoon

We've been married a whole week! That's very exciting, in a totally non-life-altering way.  Except that we're on our honeymoon. After slogging through a twenty-something hour flight we arrived in London. We'd been to London before, but in the middle of winter, so we we're looking forward to warmer weather and less ice on the footpath. Well, there's no ice but it's not exactly warmer! Generally speaking the weatheer has been just about identical to the current weather in Melbourne; 16C and cloudy on most days. We have been out and about a lot more though.

The british museum with it's stolen arefacts sacked from temples and tombs across the world, camden market, purveying artefacts supposedly from around the world, and as many bus rides as we could manage in a day.

Our theatre going included "we will rock you" at the west end and the sauciest version of "midsummer night's dream" i've ever seen at the globe theatre (not sure Oberon pashes Puck in many other versions).

It was looking pretty difficult to catch up with my cousins, Clare and Fiona until they suggested that we visit them on set for the short film they are currently producing. Just a small thing, with some locals involved, such as Stephen Marcus (Nick the Greek) and Paul McGann (the 8th doctor)...!!!

We had a great time watching how a film set works in the dark depths of a local cave network once used in the blitz; at one point housing 15,000 people.

We do have some photos but are yet to work out how to connect our ipad to our DSLR camera.

We also caught up with the two Natalies, since they came over here before the wedding. Talie is here to pursue her dream in archaeology, and Nat is here spending obscene amounts of money in Scandanavia with her beau Kris.

Our next plan was to go to the harry potter studio tour (I know, I know, geeks), but the system for entry is quite complicated and we couldn't book tickets for the time that we wanted. So we've slated that for our return to London at the end of the month. So we went to the zoo instead. The zoo was much what you would expect, although maybe i did expect something a bit more from the oldest zoo in the world.

Onward then to Wales!