Day 4 and it was time to leave London for now. We'd spent two nights in this Airbnb, not entirely comfortably--beds weren't great, or large, and then, Bean had been struck by what we assume was food poisoning during the night and spent much of the night in the bathroom being sick. It was a rough way to have to get up and get ready, but we had train tickets to York and needed to get to the station, so we got packed, tried to help her as much as we could, and hurried to the train.
When we got to the station, it took us awhile to figure out where we needed to go, but I finally found someone to help us, and then, when we tried to scan our tickets and they didn't work at first, he kindly waved us through and pointed to the right train. We found our car and the seats we'd reserved, got Bean set up in the closest seat to the bathroom without any incidence. But our relief was short-lived.
About 5 minutes after we'd sat down, a group of young men came towards us and said that they'd reserved those seats. I pulled out our tickets and they held out theirs and we saw that both sets had the same seat numbers, and then one of the guys said, "Your seats are for the 13th," and I responded with, "Yes?" and then he told me, "It's the 14th." I have a hard enough time keeping track of the day without being on vacation, but yes, it was the 14th and I'd bought tickets for the wrong day!
I hopped off the train and went searching for someone who could help us, was directed to the train conductor up in the front engine, and then got the bad news that we'd have to buy new tickets for the train. Because there were plenty of open seats, it wasn't a huge deal, but the price had gone up significantly. The conductor was able to help us out by having us buy upgrades to 1st class instead of actual new tickets (somehow that made it better, and it did save us money.)
I don't really know how I got the dates wrong, and it was only for the first half of our journey, thank goodness, so our tickets for that evening were correct, but what a mess! So, poor Bean had to move to a new car, but we still found seats together and spent the next 2 hours calming down after the nervewracking start to our day.
Luckily, by the time we made it to York, Bean was feeling just a little bit better and we were able to stash our luggage at a storage place near the train station and go check out this ancient city for a few hours. It's a really cool place with a wall surrounding the entire city.
We crossed a bridge on our way into some of the older sections.
So many old buildings, leaning this way and that.
And narrow cobblestoned streets.
We quickly found the Shambles, a historic street that Diagon Alley may have been modeled after. It definitely gives the same affect.
And they have taken advantage of that. . .with The Shop That Must Not Be Named and a magic shop.
Such a cool place.
Bean was still not feeling 100%, but Peanut was doing a lot better!
We found food at the Shambles market for those who could eat lunch, and then walked around some more.
Found a fun book and map shop,
and then found the York Minster, a medieval gothic-style church.
I'm a huge fan of all the unique doors on the churches and castles.
The church was free for 17 & under, and since we didn't really want to go in enough to pay for the 3 adults in our group (we already had plans to visit a couple other churches in the next 2 weeks), but the boys were curious, they went in and looked around for 20 minutes (and took a couple of pictures) while we hung out outside. Daddy-o and Bean made friends with a local who told them about some of the history.
I wandered through the park next door and found a small building in the back with a plaque about the baptism of King Edwin in the 600s on this site. It's amazing to think how long people have been living and worshipping in this places, even if the current buildings are only 800 years old, haha.
Then, we set out to find some of the Roman ruins that are around the city of York. This was one of the northernmost Roman cities and some ruins have been uncovered.
You can see the different layers of walls from the various centuries.
If Bug was in jail. . .
We had a little more time to wander before we needed to get back to the train station and found some fun alleys.
While the kids explored, Daddy-o ran into a couple of pharmacies. He brought his CPAP machine and planned to buy distilled water once we landed, but had no luck finding any. It's not as common in the UK as the US, but at this point, we were hopeful and kept searching.
We once again lucked out with weather--lots of clouds, a few sprinkles, but for the most part, we didn't have any actual rain.
We walked over to the York Castle but didn't go inside. We didn't have long and once again, had plans to see other castles (and had just spent hours at a much larger one the day before, so this didn't look like much.)
Then, it was time to collect our luggage and resume our trip to Edinburgh! This time, we had the correct tickets and everyone was feeling pretty good. Peanut used his ABT (audiobook therapy) and Kwells, our favorite motion sickness medicine, which is way cheaper to buy in the UK rather than import it from Austrailia, to ward off any motion sickness. He listened to the 4th Harry Potter, which went along with the theme of this trip.
Lots of green as we went.
And more sleeping people--we wiped everyone out today!
The train went along the coast as we approached Scotland--through Berwick-upon-Tweed (love the names!)
And then we got our first view of the North Sea! Not long after that, we were pulling into Waverly Station in Edinburgh and got our first sites of Scotland.
The staircases climbing to the Royal Mile through little alleys were just as enchanting as I remembered from 25 years ago. I fell in love with this city back and then and it was no different this time around.
We only had about a 1/2 mile walk to our apartment for the night, but saw so many beautiful buildings along the way.
It's really so magical--hard to believe that people live here, day in and day out, doing normal, every day stuff when it feels like a movie set or a theme park. We kept joking that Disney had outdone themselves.
Our apartment was just down the side street here. We picked up the key from the pizza place and then tried to follow the instructions, but had a hard time making sense of the addresses, and it took a few minutes to find the right place. All of the ground floor businesses were pubs and clubs--and it was LOUD. Not ideal for sleeping.
But how beautiful is this? We dumped our things and then went to grab some dinner at a nearby pizza place. Bean was doing a lot better but didn't feel like facing the smells of a restaurant, so we just brought her back a couple of slices of pizza.
This did not end up being our favorite place, haha. It was one bedroom--the living room advertised sofa beds--which turned out to be these very firm futons, with minimal bedding available to create anything resembling a bed. And there was no way they were big enough for two of our kids to share, so Peanut ended up in a bed made of blankets and pillows on the floor. Add in the fact that there were no window coverings in the living room and the sun is only down from 11:30 to 3:30 at this time of year, and sleeping was hard.
Daddy-o and I fared a little better, but in general, the beds are only full size and mostly felt really old, so nothing was particularly comfortable. And same as we found in mainland Europe two years ago, they love their one-piece bedding: a heavy duvet and duvet cover, even in the summer with no air conditioning. The weather outside was cool, but the buildings were all pretty warm, and in this case, we couldn't sleep with windows open because of how loud the block was that we were on. But I had learned a trick last time and just pulled the duvet out of every bed so we had a double layer sheet as our covers and that worked pretty well most nights.
Luckily, we were only in this place for one night--the next day was a new adventure!
