Subject: Scotland part 3 of 10 Date: Tue, 30 May 95 11:45:41 -0700 Nicest thing about the Redlands B&B was that we had breakfast in the room, along with a bathroom in the room, so we didn't have to go outside of the room to go to the toilet. Kinda nice in the middle of the night. There was also a table in the room, under a skylight, so that it had plenty of light. John got up around 6am and couldn't go back to sleep, so he just read his magazines under the skylight, while I slept some more under the feather comforter. Nice. They brought breakfast up while I was still putting my eyes on and brushing my teeth for the morning. First up was tea and toast, second up came the plates with food. Yum. It was nice not having to put on dining room manners. Just sit back and enjoy the food and the hot liquid. Once again, I had a stuffed up head. Some part of me thinks that it was partially created by the smoky bar we were at the night before, but another part of me still isn't sure that I don't have a cold. The other thing they were nice about was posting my letter for me. It turns out that there is no pickup service for mail in Britain. They only have drop off, so if you want to post a letter you have to bring it either to the post office or to a post box. The guy at Redlands was really nice and told John that he had to go into town anyway the next day, so he'd be happy to post our postcards for us. Freeway driving is a lot less nerve-wracking than in-city driving. This seems to be true regardless of the country. Since we'd found the junction to the M6 the night before, getting to it was a snap and we just rode it, in the rain, to Liverpool, south. The clouds are thicker today, a layer of them over the sky, thick, fluffy, white on top, dark on the bottom, with strains of light falling through. Big, still fluffy sheep all over the hillsides. It's not warm enough to shear them, yet, I bet. Chilly out, and John's still in his shorts while I added a sweater for warmth even in the car. The sunshine felt pretty good, but the heater feels better when the sun isn't around. The sweater is the one that I bought on our last trip. So... lots of roadway and we get to Liverpool, and I navigate our way into the Land Rover Super Market, which is near the Liverpool airport. It is a very big store, filled with lots and lots and lots of Land Rover parts. Lots of parts. So many parts that I go out into the car, pull up a book and start reading as John works his ways happily up and down the aisles with his little cart and finds lots of things that he needs. It was actually really fun sitting in the car park while Land Rovers pulled up, some of them terribly beaten up, and getting to watch them while I wrote, read and napped. A few hours later John came out with bags of parts. So we were off again, this time towards York, which seems to be a center for Yet More Land Rover parts, and south of the Lands of Wool, so we'll probably look up information on the local wool sights, find a B&B and see what there is to see. Just west of Leeds we topped a single rise and the air was filled with smoke. There were giant factory smoke stacks, all pouring out smoke, and it was rather terrible to drive through. The whole series of valleys was just filled with the stuff, and when we finally got out of it, we took a little stop at one of the 'Services' areas. They're kinda like the US truck stops with facilities to serve a lot of people, a small restaurant that had fairly good food, and lots and lots and lots of toilets all cleaned and lined up alongside banks of phones. We had a cheese sandwich, which actually was cheese with chutney and cucumbers. Yum. And something they called an apricot and almond flan... which was more like a tart shell filled with apricots, almond cream and a light, fluffy cake poured in and baked around them. Sweet and very good with a hot tea. For those of you who weren't on this list when I wrote up our first England trip, British freeways are kinda different from U.S. West Coast freeways. The same basic concepts are the same, i.e. a ribbon of concrete that's supposed to be where cars can go fast and not have to stop and all that, but there are a lot of small differences. Things like having roundabouts instead of exchanges, like the fact that *everyone* stays left unless they're passing someone, oh, right, and that everyone's driving on the left, but that's a given. Thing is that on a freeway in Britain people are actually rather considerate of other people on the freeway, slow people stay in the slow lanes, period. It's utterly astonishing and really nice to drive. Anyway, we arrived at York around 4pm, and took only half an hour to find the information booth, this time, and most of that time we were walking through a beautiful park that also held the Yorkshire Museum and a number of beautiful old castle ruins and was walled by and old castle wall. So it was a very nice adventure in this case, and time well spent. York, itself, is rather small and rather beautiful, some parts of it have been really renovated around tourist traffic, though, and there were several streets around the Minster which were completely redone tourist kitsch, it seems. But it was kinda interesting to window-shop the hundreds of tiny shops all in row. York also seems to pride itself in being a very haunted city. There were actually walking tours as to the haunted parts of the city. After finding the information place the lady pointed out several areas that were good for finding B&B's... so instead of trying to move the car first, we walked down to the B&B areas and found a nice room with a private bath (and shower stall). THEN we went back to the car, drove it to the B&B. As usual, we got a little 'lost' on the way there and found out that there was a stadium at the end of our road, a stadium for the York FC. We wandered back and unloaded all our stuff into the room. That was rather nice to do. After resting a bit, unpacking enough to feel at home, and reading until I got the car stresses out of me, we went off to find dinner. Walking through the small town was a lot of fun. Just wandering about in the cool evening air, sometimes with modern concrete underfoot, sometime cobblestones or loose brick. Everything was densely packed in together, stores close in, and it was raining very, very lightly, a Seattle style rain that could be so easily ignored. All the buildings were made of stone and brick. The Minster was a lovely, tall, old cathedral with flying buttresses of gray stone, insane arches with leaded stained glass, and gargoyles all over the place. All around it were university buildings, some of which we could see the stone walls bulging out, bending the pipes that had been laid against it, but solid enough to still live in. Good thing they don't have earthquakes here, it would be pretty frightening. We had dinner 'at a place that doesn't serve chips', as John put it in his requirements. It was called _Russell's_ and was a carvery where there were 'more Americans than in Redmond' as John put it. But I really had to have a Yorkshire pudding while in York. The lamb I had from the carvery was severely overdone, but still tender for all that. I was, however, very glad of the onion gravy and the *thick* mint sauce. The mint sauce was astonishingly thick with ground mint leaves, so dark a green that John asked if it were seaweed sauce. Yum. And, for dessert I had a sherry trifle that seemed to have quite a lot more jello than I think a traditional trifle has. We took a road that kinda looked like it might go in the right direction back to our B&B. I remembered that the end of our street was the stadium; but thought that John might be right and there might be another way to get there. Turned out that there wasn't; but we had a very nice hour and a half walk getting back. Good for walking that immense dinner off, especially since we went along another set of shops, including some craft shops that were named after looms, but didn't have a loom in the shop. Just normal craft and yarn stores. We decided that Aberdeen would probably be the closest that we'd get to Shetland, and that there might be more stuff there that had to do with the kinds of knitting that I look for. We'll see. By the time we got back to the room we were pretty tired from all the walking. I finished my book, a letter to Mark, and some of my knitting as John went to sleep in front of the TV. I then went to sleep and dreamt dreams of figuring out a way to live in the U.K. ----- end of part 3 of 10 ----- Copyright 1995 by Phyllis L. Rostykus. All rights reserved.