‘Wor ih wah wah’ was this. I must say we needed a step ladder to get into bed last night it was that high and then there was the added danger of falling out of it when turning the bedside lamp on or off. Fortunately neither of us ended up on the floor, although I did manage to bang my head a few times on the attic beams!
We woke early full of good intentions to write the blog and sort out the photos but it seemed I was suffering from writers block and Maice was having problems downloading the photos so we made an executive decision to do it all later today in the hope that everything would be back to normal. A few less glasses of wine may also help!!
We very haphazardly re-packed our cases, carefully manoeuvring them down the very steep staircase before we breakfasted on crumpets and banana and then we were off. We said our goodbyes to Tracey, who had actually got out of bed before midday to see us off. My how she’s changed!! With promises of visiting again soon and hoping to see both her and Pat in Dorset we plugged in SatNav Steve and kangaroo jumped our way out of Elland. It was my turn to drive and as usual it took time familiarising myself with the controls, what with my car being an automatic. Finally getting the hang of it we motored on, following SatNav Steves dulcet Australian twang until we came into York and that’s where it all began to go adrift! To be honest SNS needs to up his game and stop giving us key manoeuvres in yards. ‘In 800 yards turn left’. In 350 yards turn right’. Does anyone actually know what that looks like when they’re driving? We didn’t have a clue. We know what a yard looks like but when driving it’s very difficult to convert that into an actual length. When we took a wrong turn and ended up driving in amongst the city centre traffic we decided to take extra measures and drafted in Daphne, she of the IPhone Maps App fame. With three people now on the case…..Maice with the road atlas and Daphne and SNS in their SatNav’s we were hoping we’d find our destination, The Sycamore Guest House pretty soon. We were very impressed with Daphne who guided us through the traffic in a logical way, unlike SNS. ‘Turn right at the traffic lights’ she told us, as opposed to SNS who would tell us to turn right in 500 yards with no mention of a traffic light! After nine minutes we arrived at the destination but weren’t sure where to park so having manoeuvred, inadvertently, into some tight fitting private carparks I had to reverse-manoeuvre out of them. Repeating the mantra ‘Don’t hit anything Angela, remember its not your car’ over and over again I managed to exit said car parks and eventually parked right in front of the guest house. Phew. So far so good!!
Elizabeth checked us in and proceeded to read us the rules of the house. Breakfast was at 8.45am on the dot and as they’ve just had a new parquet floor fitted it was a strictly no shoes allowed in the dining room policy. We could either enter the dining room in a) our socks b) our bare feet or c) our slippers!! We’d make that choice in the morning. Elizabeth was married to Spiros, who’s Greek and I have to say we did notice the little ‘Greek-isms’ around the place, especially in our room.
We weren’t allowed to check in until 3pm so armed with our York Murder Mystery Treasure Trail we set off to the starting point at the tree by the Minster. It said it would take two hours to complete the two mile walk so before we started we sat ourselves down at ‘The House of the Trembling Madness” where we enjoyed a light lunch. With our track record, who knew how long it would actually take to complete! Fed and watered we found the tree and set off. It was just 1pm. Great, we should be finished by 3pm!
Maice was in charge of reading the clues and the directions, not a difficult task, and I was in charge of ticking off the suspects. It couldn’t be any simpler. It was a lovely trail, taking us through the narrow streets of York, past some lovely little shops and eateries and all the historic places of interest. It was all going so well until we came to clue number 17. ‘On a rugby coloured dwelling’ Maice read out. Well, we were stumped. What on earth was rugby coloured? We must have walked up and down the road, both sides, at least six times trying to find and think what a ‘rugby’ coloured dwelling was. We even googled it but nothing was forthcoming. It didn’t matter how many times she read out the clue, it meant absolutely nothing to us. ‘Let me see it’ I said and read out loud………’on a RUBY coloured dwelling’. Honestly, words fail me! Now we knew we were looking for a red dwelling we thought it would be easy to solve the clue but alas, it wasn’t to be. We ended up requesting the clue from the treasure trail people and then retraced our steps to find it. Oh, so there it is! Now, why didn’t we see that earlier? The clue was literally staring us in the face! We finally completed the trail in just over 3.5 hours, at 4.45pm to be precise. Ah well, an hour and a half over the suggested timescale is quite good for us. Seems we’re getting better at this……!
By now we were tired and thirsty and in desperate need of a coffee to perk us up. We’d passed by some lovely coffee shops on the trail but of course it being almost 5pm they were all closing. We found the next best thing….a cocktail bar, where we sipped on Espresso Martinis, and very nice they were too. An hour or so later we were in our room, getting ready for bed. Mind you we had stopped off at another bar on the walk back and enjoyed wine, gin and a portion of skinny fries!
York is such a lovely city, very compact and very easy to walk around. We‘d spotted lots of quirky cafes, bars and restaurants as we followed the trail and if we’d had enough time and more days in York we most certainly would have tried a few out. As it was, at just 7.30pm in the evening we were in our room, laying on our beds totally exhausted after our busy whistlestop tour of York.
Tomorrow morning we’re off to Harrogate to see the lovely Lisa……but before we go we need to decide what we’ll be doing for breakfast. Socks, slippers or bare feet……that is the question!!
This is M&A saying goodnight from York xx
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