Holiday tales.

After three days in London, suffering from jet lag (it get worse every trip), I caught the train from Paddington Station (no sign of lost bears) to Stratford-upon-Avon. Important not to call it just Stratford as there is a Stratford near London and it's completely the wrong place. Single ticket from London to S-U-A cost Stirling22.90 and the journey took about 2 and a half hours.

I picked the car up from the Hertz depot (a small demountable in the car park run by one harried woman with no water to wash the cars) and drove up to Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire. At least, it used to be North Yorkshire, the area has changed names several times over the years and I've lost track. It's been Cleveland, Teeside and probably a few others.

I met St Ashley of the Blessed Queue (she stood in the returns queue at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre for several hours in 2000 to get tickets to Richard II) at her local shopping centre - it was a great surprise to me that I actually found it as I have a notoriously bad sense of direction. Comes from having very little visual imagery I think. I'd printed out directions from the AA website and found them very useful indeed.

The following day we drove to York where we stayed for a couple of days. Ash had found us a lovely B and B - the Bronte Guesthouse - within walking distance of the town. We both had single rooms, mine had a view of the Minster. At least, so I was assured, there seemed to be a lot of trees in the way.


The Bronte Guesthouse - our B and B in York. 

Ash knows York as well as I know S-u-A and took us to some very interesting places. We had tea in the Spurriergate Centre in St Michael's Church. From the website: "The Spurriergate Centre was opened in 1989 as a Christian Centre offering refreshment and a listening ear to the many people who live, work in or visit York.

It is named after the original church building it now occupies - St Michael’s Spurriergate. The name Spurriergate refers to the tradesmen who occupied this street in the 15th Century - the spurmakers.

There has been a church on this site since the time of the Norman Conquest, and the building has seen many changes in its long history. The oldest parts of the building are the slender pillars holding up the roof dating from the 12th Century."

Lunch was fish and chips eaten outside another church in the town centre. We were descended upon by students from the local Christian school who wanted to sing to us all and do a survey on our religious beliefs (or lack thereof). Fortunately it started to rain and we escaped.

And afternoon tea was taken in Banks Music Store - a real music store with a very nice cafe on the second floor which was decorated with music scores and lyric sheets from the 20's and 30's.

That night we did the York Ghost Hunt. It was very amusing, very theatrical and we're so glad we did it.

After the Ghost Hunt (we didn't find any, by the way) we had dinner at the El Piano restaurant where we had the Indian tapas, a sampling of delicious Indian vegetarian goodies.


The El Piano vegetarian tapas restaurant.