Holiday Photos #30 - York

Today I'm finishing up the last of York with a hodge podge of pictures both here and on Laume's Studio. I left off promising to meet back up in front of the York Minster for a ghost tour. I thought I had a lot of photos from the tour but apparently I just have very vivid memories of the tour and not actual photos. I did snap a few though.


This was our tour guide. He did a beautiful job of looking the part and had a wonderful spooky voice as well.

This was an alley next to a museum that wasn't open again while we were there but apparently where William is standing is where an old Roman road cuts across and through the basement of the museum. Many people have reported seeing Roman soldiers marching through both the alley and the basement. Not entire soldiers however. Just the top halves, as the original road was much lower than the present day surface.

The other thing I liked about this photo is how it shows all the different varieties of brick and stone you see so abundantly.

Technically, this is a lousy photo, I know, but I had to share it with you in the spirit of "how NOT to take a photograph". I was trying to take a photo of that tree, because I loved how the trunk and branches were all lumpy and crooked. But as you can see, a certain William decided to run across the screen of vision and if that wasn't enough, I also caught the lamppost in the foreground - a fun technique when done on purpose but in this case it wasn't - and the end result was my poor camera had no idea what I was aiming at and managed to get all three layers of the photograph out of focus. Still, for some reason I like the photo - it makes one ask questions, like "Why is that boy running?"

A quilting friend (like, I've actually quilted in anyone's recent memory!), Anna, lives not far from York and she informed me that these ruins that I already shared a photo of previously, are the remains of St. Mary's.... oh dang, now I've forgotten - chapel? cathedral? Abbey! Yes, that's it. Wouldn't it be lovely to have ruins like this in your backyard? Uhm. Perhaps on a slightly smaller scale. Unless you had a really big yard.

William made a friend. This little pigeon followed him around the park for quite some time. Perhaps he looked like the kind of person a bird could depend on to toss him a few crumbs.


Just outside the walls of the park/ruins, was a pretty little street. I particularly liked this home with the beautiful climbing roses. I could live here.


We went into a number of museums in York. This shot of William dressed as an ancient Viking warrior was taken inside a museum called Yorvik, or something like that.


Inside a museum in the park they had a traveling exhibit of ancient Roman artifacts. I already shared the photo of me in Roman garb, here's William in the male version. I'm sure the sweatshirt arms and tennis shoes add to the authenticity of the look.


We went to a very large museum displaying exhibits of more current English history - current meaning in the last couple of hundred years. I took this picture because it showed how they measured market foods, specifically a bushel and a peck. I can't remember which ones are a bushel and a peck, I'm thinking the two largest. I got a kick out of it because I'm always singing an old song to my kids that includes the line "I love you a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck." Sometimes I get silly and change it to "and a hug around the nose/elbow/knee/etc.". Now I know what how much a bushel and a peck really are. Of course I love my kids way more than that - billions and trillions of bushels full.


In this same museum, old school desks. The irony of course is that when I took this picture, William had never sat in a school desk before. Of course now he sits in one five days a week and I bet he assumes this position on a regular basis.


There was a castle - well, really just a turret, or a very, very small castle - on a hill - well, really just a mound, or a very, very small hill. We climbed to the top and snapped a few photos from the parapet. I love the chimney pots, the bright red of the ferry on the river in the middle of all the faded red of the brick buildings.

Another pretty view. I liked the black clock tower and the red doors of the fire station.



And one more - the simple facade of the building in the foreground, the fussier front of the building just behind it, the old church spire poking out, the Minster in the background.



As we were climbing back down the mound I caught this sight. Here's an adult, presumably a teacher or parent chaperone, taking care of his young charges while, strolling behind him are some adult geese taking care of their own brood.



And as the sun sets, reflecting in the windows of this pretty old church, we say goodbye to York. Next post, we're headed to the big city - London!

Oh, but I forgot, don't say goodbye just yet - click on over to Laume's Studio and take another long scroll through some more picturesque images of York. I put the detail and more "artsy" ones there. (And if you missed the travelogue sans photos I posted while we were traveling, you can read them by typing "York" into the Blogger's Search this Blog box. Or choose May 2006 from the archives.)