Hi Everyone,

I've been a bit slack on my entries the last day or so - too busy having fun!!

We left Angela's early Wednesday morning in brilliant sunshine, but with a white layer of frost covering everything. We had to clear the frost off the car windows to enable us to see!! The frost soon disappeared in the warm sunshine and the southward drive with a clear blue sky was lovely.

We stayed off the motorways as much as we could preferring the lesser slower A68, to take us to York. We first drove towards Edinburgh so we could again drive across the Fouth Road Bridge, just because it's such a huge expanse and we like to see it, the above picture is that very bridge.

We used our sat nav we've named "Sally" to take us around Edinburgh to join the A68 that took us through some magnificent countryside, travelling south, rich farming areas, woodlands, hills and dales and moorlands - just beautiful.

We arrived in York and Sally was very clever taking us direct to the hotel we had pre booked in Australia, not quite so lucky this time, but it's clean and we have our own en-suite.

We walked into the centre of York, which only took us 12 minutes, so that's a bonus. We found a nice small pub for dinner, the food was good, service excellent and was built before Australia was even discovered!!

We walked back to our hotel to enjoy a good nights well earned sleep.

I had contacted Paul and arranged to meet in the centre of York about 10.00am on Thursday. We left the hotel by 9.00am again walking into the centre, we had heard you could walk around on the ancient wall that surrounds York city, finding the steps at Monkgate we walked around until we reached Petersgate, we were actually walking high up around York Minster seeing a very different view of it.

We met up with Paul at our appointed time, good seeing him again, hasn't changed and we were soon chatting. He first took us to "Betties" which is very famous for their high teas and speciality cakes, he said in the main tourist times people queue for ages, today we were fortunate and shown to a lovely table with a corner window overlooking two streets, very interesting watching the passing people, the service is very special and the tea excellent.

Our next stop was Fairfax House, a beautifully preserved Georgian house, with ornate hand carved wooden door frames and windows. The ceilings in each room depict what they were used for with the hand carvings. All the furnishing were authentic of the times and there was a very interesting collection of grandfather clocks in the various rooms.

Our next visit was to the Railway museum, again a great place to visit and learn how the steam engine developed and worked, we also saw the original royal train carriages, these of course very ornate compared to the ordinary Joe Bloggs rail carriage.

We met up with Paul in the evening again with his partner Ellen, we had met her previously on our last visit to UK, we all enjoyed a lovely dinner at the Jamie Oliver restaurant - food excellent, company the best.

So another days ends on our travel paradise - tomorrow we return to Birmingham

Chat again soon.