Well, next bike race coming right up. We stopped in Haworth, Bronte country, for lunch today, and the place was a delight. Yellow bunting festooning every building, yellow bikes everywhere, even a dummy cyclist with legs akimbo, head first in a pile of straw bales. Inadvertently, as we tried to navigate from Matlock Spa to Fountain Abbey, we ended up tracing some of the stages of le Tour, which was handy because it compensated for the convoluted and confused way...

Yesterday we moved on from the heady delights of Hartlepool. To the metropolis of Hull. Mmmmm. But in between we traversed some very picturesque country in the Yorkshire moors. We also went to Castle Howard, still owned by the Howards who are throwing everything into restoring repairing and keeping the place a going concern. Part of the Castle was burnt in a fire in 1940, and so gradually since then the family has struggled to rebuild the damaged areas - notably ...

So, we had a beautiful sunny day in the capital. Took a train from Drem, after posting two parcels of stuff home to save on excess baggage. And then we went to little places - The Georgian house; the real Mary King close, Gladstone Land; St. Giles Cathedral and it's Ornately carved Chapel of the thistle and after a little side trip to the forecourt of the castle to look at the scaffolding for the tattoo, we went to the writers' museum, where we found this quote i...

It's been a while.....we were in accommodation that didn't have internet and I got out of the habit of blogging (again!). We are going to Edinburgh today, this last full day in Scotland. It is certainly a country of many extremes - fog, rain, mountains, flats. A mill we visited yesterday is routinely flooded 2 or 3 times a year - has been every year of it's existence since it was established, oh, about 800 years ago. They are confident it has been there since 159...

Under sunny skies, we bid farewell to Glasgow, and headed for Oban. Got there well in advance of ferry departure time, so with a burning sun overhead, walked up path to McCaig's tower, which isn't a tower, but a construction which bears no little similarity to the colosseum in Rome. There was a juvenile rabbit busily dining on the grassy lawn in front of it. We ate our sandwiches by the bay, until the man next to us decided to feed the gulls. The gulls here are e...