Friday 18 May 2012

A Good Day

As mentioned in my previous post, I will try and stick to the chronological order, and will also try not to bore you to tears with overly detailed descriptions.* There will be lots of pictures, although not all of them - I took somewhere around 250 and filled almost ten pages of my album on photobucket. If you really do want to see them all, you are welcome to browse the album here, and leave comments as well.

My sister and I both slept well, us being rather tired after having spent the whole day travelling. Often, I find I do not sleep very well the first night in a strange bed, especially not when that bed is so different from my own (this one was a narrow single bed and quite on the soft side, while my own bed at home is wide enough for two, and my mattress has no bounce to speak of), but not so this time. The quiet surroundings certainly helped, too.

We had both been looking forward to our first full English breakfast, and were not disappointed!

The day looked bright and patches of blue were showing in the sky, so we decided we'd say hello to Mary and then set out to walk to Fountains Abbey.
Mary is my mother-in-law, although strictly speaking, with the death of my husband 2 1/2 years ago, we are not "related" any longer; this has not stopped us from feeling like family, though, and I am grateful for having such kind relatives in both countries. She is mentioned often in my blog, since she regularly provides me with reading material and chocolate; one of my more recent posts about her was this one.

From the B&B to Mary's house is only a short walk of maybe 15 minutes, across Ripon's market square and past the cathedral. Seeing it was looking nice and bright out there, I took my camera and can show you now a bit of Ripon:

Having walked past the Cathedral and looking back, you can see that it was indeed a fine day.
The church yard always makes me think of how well the German term fits: Friedhof, meaning court (or yard) of peace.
We saw this bird hopping about in the grass; does anyone know what it is?
This house was for sale. We were wondering whether the slightly grumpy looking cat was going to be part of the deal.
Mary's house looked as picturesque as ever. She is now 78, and still doing almost everything herself, apart from getting a handyman to cut the hedge and clean the windows. Last year, she painted all those bits blue; they used to be dark green. It goes so well with the forgetmenots! 


We did not stay long, as we wanted to make full use of the good weather, and walked back through the town and out at the other end.
The Tourist Information is practically "in" the wall, with its entrance to the left. It is staffed by very friendly people, who have proved to be helpful and kind with us  two years ago, and again this year, with such things as bus time tables and maps etc.


This is the Warehouse Café. I am sure I have talked about it before; it is a place where you can not only get a cup of tea or coffee, but very nice food such as quiches and jacket potatos, and of course cakes. The café is special in that you can buy almost anything you see - even the furniture and the crockery. The combination of antiques shop and café makes it quite interesting, and the only thing I have to complain about is their opening times... They are only open around lunch time, and we simply never were in Ripon at that hour, always being out somewhere else, so we never had a meal there this time (we did in the past). So I snuck in a few days later, when it was already open but we were on our way to catching a bus, and took the pictures of the inside.
There are three rivers running through Ripon, the Skell, the Ure and the Laver. I am quite sure that the one we crossed on leaving Ripon towards Fountains Abbey is the Laver.
We had a pleasant walk ahead; according to Google maps, it is about 4 miles and took us just a bit over an hour across fields full of pheasants and hares until we arrived at the tiny village of Studley Roger.


This post has already grown longer than I had anticipated; therefore, I will end here for today and show you the rest of our walk tomorrow.

*Not being very successful at that, am I?

17 comments:

  1. It looks lovely. I'm glad you had some fine weather, during such a wet April. I think the first bird is a thrush, by the way, unless anyone else knows better. What a very pretty bungalow.

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    1. It is a lovely place, Joanne! Thank you; I don't get to see many thrushes here, although they are, I think, also native to my area, but we mainly see blackbirds, magpies, jays, sparrows, tits, finches, crows and pigeons here.

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  2. Yes, Joanne / Meike - it's a Song Thrush.

    A lovely walk - just what I needed to wake me up.

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    1. Glad it helped, John! And we've only just started...

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  3. Hello Meike:
    It is many years since we were in Ripon but certainly remember it as a most attractive small city.

    We love the colour blue with which your mother-in-law has painted her house and how wonderful that you still feel connected to her which is, of course, as it should be.

    Kellemes hétvégét.

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    1. Thank you, Jane and Lance.
      It saddens me to see how, in Ripon just as in many other cities, I am sure, so many businesses have closed down. We walked past many boarded up places where I remember having seen shops and restaurants not that long ago.

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  4. Beautiful photos of one of my favourite counties. Apropos your mother in law, I still feel ver much related to my first husband's family, although it's now 20 years since he died.

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    1. That's nice, Frances, and I imagine it means a lot to them, too. One of my sisters-in-law told me that Mary said to her, she sees me as some way to be still connected to her son (not in a "spiritual" manner, but because we can talk about him and exchange memories and so on).

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  5. I think the bird a mistle thrush. You very rarely see the common thrush nowdays, and we used to have this larger thrush in the grounds of a country house where I used to work. The photos are lovely and definitely one of my favourite counties as I come from Sheffield.

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    1. Sorry for the small and slightly blurry picture, it makes identifying the exact type of thrush difficult, I know.

      In 2010, my sister and I visited Sheffield, and quite liked it. You can look at some pictures here:
      http://s524.photobucket.com/albums/cc327/MeksPics/England/?action=view&current=England106.jpg
      Just click on "next" after that, there's only 10 or 11 pictures from Sheffield, don't worry :-)

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  6. If you enlarge the picture you can identify it as a song thrush - the mistle thrush is more grey. We have both where I live. I just love the blue on your mother-in-law's house, it's really pretty. Fountains Abbey is one of my favourite places, it's so beautiful.

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    1. Thank you, Geranium Cat!
      And if you like Fountains Abbey, I hope you'll like my next post, too.

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  7. Thank you for taking me back to Ripon, Meike. It's so long since I was there, but I've always liked it.

    Of course you still feel connected to your mother-in-law and she to you. You have been part of each other's lives for a long time now and those links will continue as long as you both wish them to.

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    1. Glad you liked it, Perpetua! Thank you for your kind comment.

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  8. Why does it not surprise me that you have a hard mattress? I just cannot imagine you sleeping on a soft one for some reason. Mind you mine is hard too and the slightly softer one in NZ takes a few days to get used to when I return.

    Your posts are making me realise how long it is since I've been in that part of England. I spend too much time in New Zealand and France and, of course, Scotland and my visits to England seem very fleeting nowadays.

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    1. Well, the hard mattress has one main reason: it was the cheapest one at IKEA, where I bought all my bedroom furniture when I decided I wanted a new bedroom for my 40th birthday instead of the hand-me-downs and ugly early 1990s stuff I still had from my first marriage.
      But of course I tell myself I need a hard mattress for my back problems, too.

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