York

From the Lakes District we drove through beautiful rolling countryside that looked like it came straight out of "A Country Practice", or that vet TV programme, whatever it was called. The hedges in the south were replaced by stone fences in the north, and most of the houses were stone too. It was easy to see why when we looked at cross sections of the land!


York wasn't a whole lot different, as it is a walled city so there were plenty of cobblestones, stone houses and a very impressive 3 miles of wall around the perimeter of the old city.

We found accommodation just outside the wall - after a couple of attempts, as we discovered the annual races were on! Our big mission for the day was to find a laundrette as we were seriously running out of clothes. We did eventually, and then walked along part of the wall back to the hotel.

Next day, when we took the hop- on, hop-off bus, we found we had walked past several important historical buildings.


One of these was Clifford's Tower, one of the few remains of the original York Castle.

Being in York for race day was fun. We have never seen so many people all dressed up! Men in suits, and women in hats, posh frocks and high heels that looked impossible to walk around in all day. We saw them around lunchtime catching buses to the racecourse, and, in varying degrees of drunkeness, in the pubs later on. Many of the pubs do not serve food, so there were dozens of very well dressed people standing in the streets eating fish and chips and KFC!