Have you ever been to a place and then when you go back its totally different than what you remembered? My memories of York were that it was such a medieval city with tons of different nooks and crannies that held such historical stories. That part is still true. I remember York as being so quaint and fun, and I’ve always regarded it as one of my favorite places…especially the Minister, I remember it as being so white you wondered how they kept it so pristine. This visit, I still enjoyed our time…but it wasn’t exactly as I remembered.
For example, when my mom and I visited York we went to the Vikings exhibit, Jorvik – the Viking name for the city of York, and we LOVED it. We remember this cool automated ride through the excavated streets of York where they found all kinds of really cool stuff about the lives the Vikings lived. So I was excited to take Jason and re-live the fun. Not so much. We did go while we were in York, and it was still interesting, but not as powerful as my memories would have led me to believe. Jason was a good sport, it was a tourist trap we could have avoided…but we didn’t have too many of those, so it was still fine. Anyway, on to our story about our whole visit to York.
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| Medieval City Gate into York |
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We arrived to York early afternoon, and we had a driving….challenge. Jason deserves a ton of credit. I was trying to navigate with not too great of a map and I said, “yeah turn left here….” well that took us through this medieval gate to the city. (Pictured on the right) Originally made for horses, our car barely fit and once on the other side we wound up on a restricted access dead end street at the base of the Minister. Jason had to y-turn in a crazy tiny tight space (with the manual car!) and then go back through that crazy gate. Whoa. York is a walking town; don’t try to drive it…after navigating and driving around for a really long time (very frustrating) we finally found our B&B and checked into our second smallest room on the 3rd floor. It was comfortable, but nothing to spectacular.
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| Clifford's Tower |
We walked into the city and went to the Jorvik exhibit (see my comments about this above), and then we headed over to Clifford’s Tower. A remnant of a larger castle that once was on the site, the tower has a gruesome history and gives some pretty amazing views as well.
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| View of the chocolate factory-KitKats, yum! |
The guards, ticket takers and hosts are pretty amazing throughout England, but the one at Clifford’s Tower went above and beyond telling us one of our favorite stories about the chocolate factory (pictured to the right) that makes 6 million Kit-Kat bars a day! It supplies all of the UK from this one factory. We thought this was really fun, so we brought a bunch of York Kit-Kats back for our friends and family to enjoy. Yummy chocolate!
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| Waiting in front of city art museum for our walking tour of York |
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| Years of York history revealed in the layers of this wall |
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| On the walls around the city of York |
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| And you think your house has foundation issues?!? |
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| York Minister |
