I just liked this pic of rain spitting up from a cloud

One of the trials of life on the road is Constant Change.  Moving each day to a new place, trying to find one’s way around town, packing and unpacking, looking for good restaurants, etc.  We’ve solved many of these issues thru planning and experience.  Contrary to how I normally travel, i.e. not in high season, this year I did pre-book all our accommodation and twice we’re going to actually stay put for three nights in a row one place!  It might mean some back-tracking at the end of the day, but the payoff will be knowing where we are going and what to expect.  As for food, we travel with a soft-sided cooler bag which functions as our bar/picnic basket, and dinners for us are often feasts from this bag when we don’t feel like venturing out.  And packing: we leave our big suitcases in the trunk of the car and each afternoon put into one carryall everything we’ll both need for the night/next day, so we really only have a couple of small bags to carry up.  But even the best laid plans do go awry sometimes…

We determined that Wednesday was Laundry Day, something to be done later on when all our touring of York was complete.  The afternoon rains delayed things a bit so by the time we ventured forth from our hotel room, did a spot of interneting at McDonalds (free wi-fi, didn’t even buy an ice cream, honest!), and finally tracked down the only laundrette within York’s city walls, it was just about to close.  The nice man said we could leave our dirties with him, and he’d have them washed/dried/folded by 9:30am the next day.  Sorted.  Except we didn’t show up Thursday until 12:03pm, 3mins after he closed for the day!  Momentary panic set in and I had visions of having to drive all the way back across the Yorkshire Moors Friday just to pick up our unmentionables!!  I ducked into the salon next door and the nice lady from the Okanagan (!) called the launderer on his cell and he agreed to return to the launderette to free our hostage clothes within the hour.

This delay, plus driving in circles around the Ring Road in the rain, and our general putzing around in the morning, put us seriously off-schedule so we didn’t arrive at Castle Howard, one of the grandest private residences in England, until 1:30pm. 

And this was the entrance to the car park!  Just taking these photos of the grand 3-mile entrance (2 walled gates AND an obelisk? come on!), depleted my camera battery.  Can anything else go wrong?

A refreshing cup of tea, and a quick plug-in to the cafe’s wall outlet, recharged all our batteries and we set off to discover “Brideshead Revisited”.

I don’t quite remember seeing it but there was a famous BBC mini-series in 1981 of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited, starring Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons; then apparently a movie remake in 2008 (did anyone actually see that?) that were filmed here at Castle Howard.  The movie production company actually rebuilt some rooms that were still empty shells after a tremendous fire in 1940 that damaged 1/3 of the house.  So it’s a partial museum to the novel as well as the Howard family.

Much of the house is still used by the family, so the public gets to see several rooms set up as “show rooms” to illustrate what the decor might look like back then, not precisely what the rooms were actually used for.  For example, the State Dining room might have actually been used as a living room.  But that’s cool, we wouldn’t know any different…

Painting of Henry VIII + photograph of grandkid in same room!

A tiny bit smaller than Chatsworth’s DR

And the grounds are magnificent!!

The cloudy skies above were threatening us with rain so we hightailed it back to our car to seek out our new B&B while the going was still good.  Not a crazy busy day but adventurous nonetheless!