Dawdling through the Dales

Yorkshire was lush, green and refreshingly quiet. We didn't feel an opened-armed welcome here, but the people were friendly and helpful. Sometimes amazingly so.

Quick Tips:

When things don't work out, flex!

Best Way To Get Around:

This was a day for getting off the beaten path and following whims. The only answer was a car.

Sometimes you just have to take what you can get. All the B&Bs in Darlington had shut for the night by the time we got to town. Blackwell Grange was the only thing left. We bore our misfortune bravely, grinning the whole time.

The mansion, built in the late 1600's is a spectacular building set on a large estate complete with sweeping drive and golf course. The rooms were the most luxurious accomodations we had in the UK. Compared to other hotels the rooms were spacious. We valiantly put up with the indoor swimming pool and hot tub. The excellent buffet breakfast included the closest thing we found to what we call sausage.

Watching All Creatures Great and Small did not prepare us for the experience of finding a fine Indian restaurant in Yorkshire. A lot has changed since James Herriott romped through the Dales.

The meal we enjoyed here was one of the best we had in the UK. The food was excellent, so good in fact we forgot all about calling to confirm our room reservations. Our waiter provided great service and was genuinely interested in us and our trip. (That's trip, not tip!)

This one is worth dragging teenagers through. Mine stopped grumbing 'another church?' long enough to really enjoy it.

The ruins of Fountains Abbey lie in a green velvet valley beside a stream and are the focal point of a fantastic neo-classical water garden called Studley Royal.

A walk down into the valley takes about fifteen minutes, the mysteries of the Abbey building require far more time to explore. A whole day could easily be spent here just enjoying the hush and the sounds of gently falling water. Allow plenty of time to take pictures or to sit down and paint. Come back up through the deer park and past striking St. Mary's Church.

Special events are held on the grounds and educational talks are sometimes scheduled. I wanted to stay for the Fountains Abbey by Torchlight Tour.

Open April through Sept. 10-7, Oct. through march 10-5

Entry £4.30 Children £2.10 Steep but well worth the cost. We invested in an English Heritage family pass that saved us a substantial amount over the whole trip.

To illustrate the friendliness of the people of the British Isles, I always refer to the night we arrived in Darlington, Yorkshire.

We'd played around too long everywhere we went that day, and the task of making sure of rooms just didn't seem important until, oops! too late.

We called all the hotels, guesthouses, inns and B&B's in town. Everything was full except a disgusting flophouse kind of place we stopped at by mistake. By ten o'clock we were tired, getting rather frantic and running out of gas.

As a last resort before driving on down the highway, when I went to pay for the gas I asked the cashier if she knew of any place that might have space.

She didn't but she pulled out the phone book, asked how many were in our party and started calling around. She kept up a running commentary about the town and our trip as she called people she knew who ran B&Bs, then called all the hotels they reccomended. She finally found us a room at Blackwell Grange. It was not quite what we'd anticipated but after all her effort how could we turn it down?