Deja vu in Whitby

Two posts in one week!  Can you handle it?!?!

This one might be brief though - being the multi talented woman I am, I'm blogging and watching tv at the same time.  (Season one of Breaking Bad.  So far, so good.)

Anyway, the point....  Here it comes:

Returning from Paris was a little sad - we'd have happily stayed there a while longer.  But, no time to wallow, the next weekend was the Easter long weekend.  New friends of ours, also from Aotearoa's fair shores, invited us along on their weekend away to the North York Moors.  

By lunchtime on Good Friday, we were in York.  A walled city with an amazing "Minster", which we stumbled into in the middle of a Good Friday service.  There were some pretty old crypts underneath that date back to when Adam was a cowboy and there was the coffin of a saint down there too.  Well, the bones were saint's.  The coffin came from a Roman Legionnaire.  They turfed him out to make way for the saint.  Nice. And of course there was the Horn of Ulf.

After a lovely pub lunch, we continued on to our little stone cottage in the Moors.  They'd had a really good dumping of snow the week before we arrived, but by the time we got there the power was back on.  

The next day we went down to Robin Hood's Bay (where Kevin Costner washed up after returning from the Crusades, perhaps?).  This really cute bay buried at the bottom of a hill was full of rock pools and people were taking their boats out while kids tried to catch goodness knows what with little coloured nets.  Every other person we saw was chowing down on the most amazing smelling fish and chips...  when in Rome, right?  These F'n'Cs were incredible.  Crispy batter, fresh fish, good chips and loads of tartare sauce.  Excellent.

Om nom with new buds Cherie, Laura and Campbell

 

On Sunday we caught a steam train from Pickering to, would you believe, Whitby.  It did bear some resemblance to the Porirua version - in that it was by the sea.  Captain Cook spent some time here before he was made Captain of the Endeavour.  We had this lovely older gentleman give us the complete rundown of his life.  The highlight of the trip was when, after our guide realised all five of us were from NZ, he asked us if we "knew any real Maoris".  Oh dear.  Total exposure clearly came from history books written in the 1800s...  This marked our saturation point for museums.  Five museums (did I mention the Railway Museum in York?) and two churches in the space of a week is just too much.

Harry Potter cabin!

On the train on the way back, we managed to take charge of a Harry Potter-style cabin.  It had the polished wooden panelling and previously plush, springy seats.  We had to fight some pensioners for it, but we were triumphant in the end.

On Monday we said goodbye to Yorkshire and made our leisurely way back home.

Two sleeps until Barcelona!!  Ole!

M&K