Ok…the last part of our trip we are over in the Yorkshire Dales National Park area and stayed in the town of Skipton…well, to be scrupulously correct we did spend 2 nights in Oxford but (a) we were pretty much down hard with the bronchitis by that point and (b) it poured rain just about the whole time we were there so other than going out to dinner the first night we never left the hotel. We were originally going to do the walking tour and also have a drink at the Morse Bar which is the location where the author of the Inspector Morse novels sat and wrote all of his books…but sick/rain pretty much cancelled everything. After Oxford we drove back to London, dropped the car off at Heathrow Hertz and flew back…landing back in Miami about 1700 and then drove home so it was like 0200 the next morning body time by the time we went to bed.

As I said in my last post…there are a lot of good things about the roads and driving around in the UK…nice standard speed limits and roundabouts instead of traffic lights for the most part. A lot of Americans don’t like roundabouts but that’s mostly because they’re not used to them…but in reality they’re way more efficient than lights until the traffic load gets pretty heavy and at that point some of the roundabouts at major road intersections also have traffic lights installed but mostly they’re absent and we’ve always found roundabouts to be a brilliant idea.

On the other hand…their ability to design a proper shower door is…extremely lacking and the primary one we found is impossible to use without flooding the floor. First off…most of them have a half dozen or more controls and figuring out which ones worth together how without instructions is a bit awkward the first time…and second off no two shower setups have any sort of standard control layout. Second…instead of a door that shuts or a shower curtain that one pulls around…most of them have this half door thing.

They’re terrible…just terrible.

Anyway…on to photos around the Dales…you’ll notice a lot of gray skies and rain clouds…but hey, it’s England so whaddya expect?

Connie took this at one of the places we stopped at…the fellow in the food truck there said that in All Creatures Great and Small season III (which hasn’t made it to this side of the pond yet) there were some scenes filmed in this barn…and one of the stars and his lady friend in the series had a picnic just in the green area past these sheep alongside the brook above.

An old train trestle.

These striped cows are a breed known in the UK as belties.

This is Janet Foss…that means waterfall…just a few hundred yards from where the shots above were taken…it’s a bit upstream on the brook with the sheep above.

Middleham Castle…favorite residence of Richard III…he’s the one whose grave they found a few years ago under a parking lot. Close. Up of some of the construction.

And yes…it’s got a moat so it’s a real castle.

And a statue of old Richard himself.

Another nice waterfall we visited…although the flow is kinda minimal as despite the rain the days we were there the area has been in a drought for a bit.

And our last castle ruin…although again…no moat so is it *really* actually a castle? Neil thinks not, but it was up on a hill so it’s at least a bit defensible I guess.

So…over all how did we like our trip? It was pretty decent even though the bronchitis and rain had us skipping some of our planned activities but that’s the way it is I guess. He got used to the wrong side of the road and wrong side of the car a lot quicker than on our trip to Ireland back in the RVing days…and this time on return to the US driving normally did not seem strange for the first day or so like it did that time…by the time we got out of the Marriott where we left the car at CheapAirportParking.com he was back to normal. One thing we did learn though…we ain’t spring chickens any more so if we’re flying back from over there again and lose the 5 hours making it a really long day…and if we fly out of Miami we’ll stay overnight in Miami before driving home…we wuz really wiped out by the time we got home.

After getting home Saturday…we went to the Urgent Care clinic on Monday and got some drugs for the bronchitis that I already talked about and essentially spent the next 2 weeks (Connie) and 3 weeks (Neil) finishing getting over it. As I write this on Aug 3 they’re finally pretty much back to normal…thank goodness for that because they were getting really, really tired of it.

Interesting things found on the net.

Equal opportunity gender ones here…

And finally…

Cyas.