Yorkshire Holiday 2016: Wensleydale and Hawes

It is the 6th of September today, and a fine sunny day it is going to be by the looks of it (7:22 in the morning as I am typing this). The 6th of August was a beautiful day, too - maybe you remember it from my "Live Blogging". If not, you can read that brief summary of our trip to Wensleydale here.
Now you are going to see the pictures I took that day:

Getting off the car in Hawes at the Wensleydale Creamery:
 

Inside the creamery. The first few rooms are a little museum with old cheese-making equipment and a very nicely set-up typical farmhouse kitchen of long ago.

After that, there is a modern-day exhibition with bits about the history of the creamery and interesting facts about cheese. For instance, did you know that Britain has considerably more types of cheese than France? I was rather surprised by that.

Depending on the day, cheesemaking in progress can be watched, but not on the day we were there (Saturday). Therefore, after having watched an interesting film about Wensleydale cheese and the creamery, we went to the café for snacks and drinks (it was a little past lunch time now). It took a long time to make it to the top of the queue, but we had our food eventually and enjoyed it outside in the sun.
Our next stop was the cheese-tasting room - this was cheese heaven!!!
One could go round the presentation table as many times as one wanted, tasting as much as you liked of at least 20 different types of cheese being made and sold at the creamery. Of course, they were all for sale, too, but we couldn't buy much since we were going to fly home in only a few more days and restrictions about importing food such as cheese are rather off-putting.

Views from the café patio:

We all browsed the large, well-stocked shop before leaving the creamery and walking down the road into Hawes itself:

It was very busy (as it should be on a fine Saturday in August), so there will be people and cars on many pictures, giving you a realistic impression of how we experienced this beautiful small town:

As I said in my "Live Blog" post back in August, the drive home was beautiful - so many small towns and villages we came through along the narrow road taking us through the wonderful Wensleydale and Wharfedale before reaching Ripon again. I could have taken pictures all the time, but I know they would not have turned out good from behind the window of a driving car.

It is difficult to say which were the highlights of our holiday, because everything we did and everywhere we went was great; but that day was definitely special.