York

First full day in York and the sun is actually shining!!!  I practically

push the boys out the door in my hurry to go see everything while it’s not raining.  We have a little bit of a walk to get to the city walls, but once we’re there, there is nothing else I want to do.  I want to walk the walls.  York is an entirely walled city and the walls are 3 miles long.  We can see the flooding that has been effecting this area so much and there are café’s under water, all of the cruise boats are stuck in between two bridges because

 there is no way they can fit under the bridges right now.  The walls are awesome to walk along and I’m explaining to Oscar what all the little niches were used for, like pouring boiling oil on people who are trying to get in to your city, so now he stops at the openings, pours some “boiling water” and shoots some arrows.  Yup, we’re learning a lot on this trip.  Every gate, we have to go down stairs and then back up on the other side of the street

and it’s amazing to think that this fortification kept the town safe and most of the wall follows the Roman fort that was here before.  I had heard that Constantine was proclaimed Emperor of Rome in Britain, but didn’t know that it was at York.  We come to the part of the wall where there was no wall because there was a huge pond here where the rivers came together, and I can start to see why New York was named after this town.  There are two rivers that come 

together with some land dangling down in between like Manhattan and the Hudson and East Rivers….so, I guess it makes more sense than New Amsterdam really.  We head into town on the advice of a woman that says there are some cafes this way who apologizes profusely for touching Oscar on the head.  I find it amazing that we have returned to our part of the world in this little island, when this nice lady who is giving us advice feels that she has

apologize more than once for touching our child without permission.  Oscar says that he didn’t even notice her touch him, he has gotten that used to being handled by people in Turkey and Greece.  I kind of miss the way that people are more demonstrative in these other countries, but I guess with coronavirus going around, it’s better to have people afraid to touch us at this time.  We finally find a nice little café and sit to rest our feet and have some amazing (John says the best of this trip) cappuccino, tea and cakes.  Oscar spends time coloring in a book and we look through some shops near here, try

to get money out and realize that John’s debit card has been deactivated.  I pull out cash myself and want to shout from the rooftops that my little local bank has been on it with every stop that we have been at.  A nice girl in my branch wrote out a list by hand of every location that we would go on our trip and I haven’t had one problem using my card.  Awesome.  We find the Shambles and have a detour down through the market, in these little alleyways filled 

with shops that are magical (literally, they’re filled with Harry Potter stuff) and all these medieval buildings that are bulging, swaying, dipping from the years.  We finally stop for lunch at the Duke of York and John is in heaven.  Not only is his food great, the beer is great, my mango cider is great and the only one not happy with his hand cut fries is Oscar.  But he only wants to know if he can have his fudge from the fudge shop we visited, so he’s not that put out.  We head 

    back out to the wall because we’re determined to finish the entire thing while the sun is still shining.  The sun is starting to go down, the wind is picking up and it’s getting colder, and by the time we finish, we’re ready to head for home.