Hello!
This is a random one because it didn’t fit in the last blog about Scotland, and it doesn’t fit in the next one (spoiler: the next one is Paris).
Driving: Moffat to York
On Thursday morning we left Scotland and made our way to York. We mainly stuck to the highways for this one as we wanted to be able to spend some time in York in the afternoon.
Along the way we had a quick look at Hadrian’s Wall which is a wall that was requested by the Roman Emperor Hadrian as a way to strengthen the Roman border. It’s amazing that a wall of its size has lasted almost 2000 years! There have been many farmers who haven’t removed it over that time!
We took some of the smaller highways down to York and ended up stuck behind campervans which delayed our journey!
We arrived in York at about 2pm and checked into our accommodation which was walking distance to the city centre. We walked into town through the old town gates and started to look for York Minster. I knew it was huge and that we couldn’t miss it, and we came around a corner and I saw it and thought “oh yeah that’s kind of big”. We kept walking and more of the cathedral was revealing itself. It got bigger and bigger! Turns out York Minster is pretty huge.
I was keen to walk up the tower so we got in the queue and noticed there was a fast track line for people who bought tickets online. So while standing in the queue, I bought tickets online and then just went straight through. What a weird system!
Inside you really can see how massive this cathedral is. The ceilings are high, everything is just so big! We even passed some organ pipes which were huge!
The most exciting part was the tower tour. We climbed the 275 steps to the top up a skinny spiral staircase and we were presented with incredible views of the city! You could see for miles from the top and we were lucky it was sunny with not much wind!
The trip back down was much faster than going up, but the staircase only spirals one way the whole way down so we were dizzy at the bottom!
Next stop was the Shambles. Perfect name to be honest. This is an ancient street full of shops and it really is a shambles. The buildings stuck out over the street in weird ways, the road isn’t straight and it’s full of bumps! At some point during the day Miriam said to me “I’ve come to realise that nothing over here is flat. Not the floors, not the roofs, not the walls. They’re all wonky” which is pretty accurate!
We kept walking around and found the street named Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate which is thought to be one of the shortest streets in England.
We walked back to the entrance to the city and did the walk around the city walls which was cool! The whole city had been a walled city and as it expanded, they kept the walls and only knocked them down when they needed to build a major road through. It’s pretty cool!
Finally we sat down and had some dinner at a pizza place called Dough Eyed. It’s an authentic Italian pizza place and Miriam said it’s the best pizza she’s ever had! It was pretty amazing pizza and was a great way to finish off an exhausting day of driving and walking!
Driving: York to London
There really isn’t much to report here! We pretty much drove straight through as we didn’t want to be stressed for our trip into Paris on the Eurostar. We did a quick detour through Cambridge but didn’t really get to see anything. We made it to London in plenty of time and as I write this we are sitting on the Eurostar!
Bye for now! 👋🏻
