Traveling North

I had the good fortune to spend last weekend up north in Durham with some other Fulbright friends. Natalie from Napa now lives in Durham, which is a beautiful university town, and unfortunately she has to head home to the states after Christmas because she's on a half-year exchange. So we decided we had better venture north to visit her straight away. After a full week of teaching, I rushed off to the tube to get to the train station, where I caught a train to Milton Keynes to meet up with Rebecca, who has a car and planned to drive us the four hours up to Durham. I'm not usually a huge fan of long car rides back home, but being in a car has become such a novelty to me now that I was quite excited at the prospect of a mini road trip. Rebecca is a fabulous driver--you'd think she'd always been driving on the wrong (I mean the left) side of the road. We had fun on our drive, catching up with each other, sharing stories of half-term holiday trips, and watching the crazy road signs. We also quickly learned that the closer you get to the north of England, the more excited people get about the north, and that excitement comes through on the road signs, which all began to say in huge block capital letters "The NORTH."

We arrived pretty late Friday, but of course had to stay up even later chatting with our friends Natalie, Jessica and Christy. There's always so much to catch up on and so many stories to tell! The next morning we got up and set out on a nice walk through the cool fall weather to check out the town. I had heard Durham is quite posh, as it is the home of Durham University, one of the top universities in the country. And posh it was! It's a darling little town, set against the backdrop of the lovely northern England landscape and a massive cathedral and castle. We checked out some of the cute shops (duh!) on our way to the cathedral, then spent some time exploring the inside. We even climbed to the top of the tower, all 325 steps! The view from the top was amazing and well worth the huffing and puffing and moments of slight panic I felt occasionally as I realized I was trapped half-way up a tiny, winding tower of stairs.

Walking down to Durham from Natalie's house. That's the cathedral in the background.

The town of Durham is very cute!

Durham Cathedral

The cathedral's door knocker is famous because the cathedral was a place of sanctuary for many criminals and people in trouble who would run up to the massive cathedral doors and knock for safety. 

Harry Potter fans--does this look familiar?

Several scenes from the first two Harry Potter movies were filmed here.

The view from on top of the cathedral tower.

Breathtaking! 

Feeling on top of the world! 325 steps is a lot of steps!  

After our tower climb, we were all ready for lunch, so we set off for a nice cream tea, which is my favorite kind! :) I had a nice berry herbal tea, and washed it down with mini sandwiches, a scone and a chocolate eclair. They sure know how to "lunch"in this country! After gorging ourselves, we continued to walk around the town a bit longer, but by 4 o'clock we were already starting to lose our light, which meant touring more would be kind of tricky. Generally when we all travel together, we are go-go-go nonstop all weekend. But this weekend, we decided to chill out at Natalie's house with take away dinner and Harry Potter DVDs (which we picked up during ourw nice long stop at the giant Tesco-- which is like a Fred Meyer--in Durham). We even did a little coloring in a Christmas coloring book I found at Tesco. It was divine!

Here's some sights from our afternoon walk:

The next morning, we decided to take Rick Steves' advice and go check out a living history museum near Durham called Beamish. We weren't sure what to expect, really, but none of us were disappointed. Beamish is one of those cute little recreated towns with people dressed up in different roles. Rick said the best way to get the most out of Beamish was to interact with the workers, so that's just what we did. We really enjoyed chatting with the dentist, the maids, the banker, the automobile shop man, the newspaper man (my personal favorite) and just about everyone else we could find. But mostly we had fun taking a million pictures and just being silly together.

This is one of the little busses that takes you to the different parts of the Beamish museum

On the bus!

The museum is set in the most lovely countryside

The Beamish town center

At the museum, you can walk through all the different houses and shops. This is a nursery room. 

A bit of South London followed me up to Beamish! The neighborhoods on this wagon (Clapham and Brixton) are were I live and work in London! 

The print shop at Beamish

The "publisher" is making us some newspapers

The old schoolhouse

Look, I'm a teacher in England!

We also visited the Beamish farm, where this little chicken guy scooted out through the fence to go explore.

He started running down the hill when he spotted this couple...

"Are you my mother?" I think he wanted a little snack. :)

We also met this lovely big pig who was oinking and eating and snuffing around. 

I think I could easily live in this sweet little cottage.

I'm gonna be so sad when Natalie has to go home!

At about 1 p.m., it was time for us to part ways, which is never easy. While the others headed off to catch their trains, Rebecca and I began our four-hour trek home, back to The SOUTH.

Rebecca, the fabulous driver!

Headed South. Here's an example of one of some of our favorite signs. See the blue sign on the left with two slash lines? It's counting down the exit. There's another slash sign a little further up, right before the exit. The signs actually begin with three slashes, then count down to one, then you can exit.