After a very long flight we were back in the UK. Thankfully friends picked us up from the airport and took us back to their place where we recuperated from our journey. The next day while we were still in the London area we visited the Warner Brothers studio where they made the Harry Potter movies, a very interesting place to visit. The following day we headed by train back to the midlands to be reunited with our bike. It did take some effort to get it started, but eventually she fired up and we were on the road again! Our adventure wasn't to start immediately, first we needed to get a set of new tyres fitted, we had prearranged them. Then we spent a couple of days getting our gear sorted and the bike packed properly.
So with mixed feeling we said farewell to my cousin and embarked on the third leg of our epic adventure. The forecast was for a warm fine day and with it being a Bank Holiday Monday we expected there to be a lot of traffic on the roads, and we weren't wrong, but fortunately most of it was heading in the other direction. First stop was York where we visited the most impressive Railway Museum before walking a lot of the small back streets packed with people making the most of the first good weather England had had for some time. We had a look at the outside of the Minster, but weren't prepared to pay the entrance fee to see the inside. Next stop was just out of Scarborough at our first English camp ground, very different to other camps we have used around the world and a lot better than many of them.
Into Scarborough the next morning to see where some of Julie's roots came from before we spent many hours looking around the castle ruins.
We spent too many hours in Scarborough, so by the time we got to Whitby we were running quite late and there was no chance of getting to the camp we were headed to. It didn't help that on the way to Whitby we stopped at an amazing little village on the coast called Robin Hood's Bay. This village is built down the side of a very steep hill leading down to the sea and is full of lovely little houses and shops squeezed down narrow streets, some no more than walkways, brilliant and very popular with tourists. We spent the night in a camp just north of Whitby before continuing north westerly the next day through the North York Moors and North Pennines, past Hadrian's wall and onto Alnwick to have a look at the castle, but by the time we arrived it was near closing time. It hadn't been a very nice day on the bike, it had rained most of the day and at times we had our fog lights on because of the heavy fog we were passing through, we even passed some snow still on the ground! But now in the afternoon it had stopped raining and because we were late for Alnwick Castle we decided to use the daylight to head to Holy Island to see Lindisfarne Castle. To get to the island we had to cross a causeway that was still covered by the sea when we arrived, but with the tide receding we waited with others until it was safe to cross. The island is a wonderful wildlife sanctuary and would be a lovely place to stay for a while in summer. Lindisfarne castle is a small castle built on a small rocky outcrop and was quite a site to see. We spent the night in our third camp back on the mainland with the hope the next day would be fine and that we would be able to visit Alnwick Castle in the morning. The next morning was indeed fine and sunny, but now the wind was blowing and quite cold. We arrived at Alnwick quite early and spent 4 hours looking around it. Alnwick Castle belongs to the Duke of Northumberland and is still used today by his family and has been for seven hundred years! While we were in Alnwick it started to rain and did most of the way to Scotland. Progress has been quite slow up until now, there is just some much to see in the UK, we could easily spend a year here and just scratch the surface of what we want to see, there is just so much history.