Trips

Sat., 6/18/16 – York to somewhere along the M6 between Penrith and Carlisle
        Today was a travel day heading toward Scotland.  We drove to Harrowgate, which is a spa town.  Its cold mineral springs were once claimed to be able to cure any and all ailments.  There is a roof over the one sulfur well.  Agatha Christie mysteriously disappeared and then was found alive in Harrowgate in 1936.  She then began writing the Miss Marple series. 
        We drove through Skipton for a “comfort” stop and to stretch our legs.  Outside of town is the RAF base at Minwith Hill.  It is an electronic monitoring and intelligence-gathering base.
        We then entered the Yorkshire Dales with hills and valleys that were the setting for All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot.  The “Calendar Girls” movie was filmed in the Dales in 2003.

Skipton - Minwith Hill RAF base	Bicycles ahead of the bus - brave people
In honor of the 2014 Tour d' France	Such interesting place names
We stopped in Settle for another rest stop.   Settle was once a cotton-spinning town.  It lies between Wiggleswick and Giggleswick towns and is another farm market town with a bus/coach park so tourists can see their quaint town.  It is in the area of many hiking/walking paths around and across sheep pastures and dry-stone walls up and down the low hills.         The Tour d’ France, in 2014, and the Tour de Yorkshire passed through where we had been driving and some of the bicycles painted yellow  (Td’F) and pale blue (Td’Y) are still decorating the road and towns.
More bicycles - blue is for the Tour of Yorkshire
Street scene	Hard at work Program Director
Before lunch we entered the beautiful Lake District of England.  This is the wettest area in the UK, has the deepest and longest lakes, and the highest peaks in England at 3,000 feet.          The Lake District was the home of Beatrix Potter and she wrote Peter Rabbit in 1901 at Hill Top Farm.  Potter was a conservationist and was able to buy up farms farmers could no longer afford and then rented them back (at a fair price) their land as tenant farmers.  She encouraged them to open cafes or B & Bs to make additional income.  Many of the farms she owned were willed to the National Trust.  We ate lunch in one of her farms, High Yew.  Many of these farms have a special breed of sheep, Hardwick.  The lambs are black and as they mature they turn grey.         Before going to lunch we stopped for a comfort stop at Windermere and looked at Lake Windermere which, at nine miles, is the longest natural lake in England.  Liz gave us a sample of Kendal Mint Cake, a minty candy made in Kendal.         All 40 of us squeezed into three rooms of High Yew.  We had homemade carrot soup and delicious white and brown bread and then three kinds of dessert: orange spice cake, raisin tea bread, and chocolate squares.  The owner runs a cafe three miles away.  The house has slate floors and is heated by a Dumfries stove that also heats water and is very environmentally friendly.  Queen Elizabeth II visited this house in 1985.	Stone walls and sheep
Lake Windermere	More narrow lanes
Home-hosted lunch at High Yew	Home-hosted lunch at High Yew
Home-hosted lunch at High Yew - slate floor	Home-hosted lunch at High Yew
Home-hosted lunch at High Yew	Our bus took us back along a very twisty and narrow lane to a main road and on to Grasmere for a comfort stop and to stretch our legs.  William Wordsworth is buried in St. Oswald Parish Church graveyard with his family.  The church was founded in 642 CE and the present church was partly built in 1250.  Oswald was a king of Northumbria and became the saint of kings.  The church has a slate floor and wooden beam ceiling.         We drove on beside the Therwell Reservoir, which supplies water to Birmingham,  where we watched a bunch of BASE jumpers drifting in the thermals off a little hill cliff.
Animal hazards - Hardwick sheep	Grasmere
Grave of William Wordsworth
St. Oswalds Church	St. Oswalds Church
St. Oswalds Church	BASE jumping - jumping off a cliff with a parachute

        We arrived at the Hotel Westmoreland.  It is actually at a truck stop along the M6 between Penrith and Carlisle.  It is modern and tucked in among the hills so we did not hear or see the motorway.
        Before dinner at the hotel, Liz had another “learning and discovery” for us.  A local man, Robert, spoke to us on how he builds these wonderful dry stone walls.  It was very logical and we now want to examine them more closely, looking for the footing, through stone, and caping stone.
        Today it did not rain, the sun actually came out after lunch and Marge and I had rotated to the front seat on the bus. It was a gorgeous day.

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