This page contains clickable images.
If you want to see a larger image of any of these pictures, please click on the picture.
We didn't get out of bed on Sunday morning until it had gone 9am. We pottered around and had a leisurely breakfast. Despite buying cereal and milk (cow's for Stephen and soya for me) we elected to have bakery goods for our breakfast. I had a potato cake, which I heated under the grill; and then I had a couple of pieces of toast. I think Stephen just had toast, as the pack of crumpets wasn't touched.
When we still hadn't quite got out of the door by 11:30am, I said to Stephen that we should turn on BBC1 and get the CountryFile weather forecast for the week, which comes on just before noon. It was good news, as British weather for the next week is largely controlled by a high pressure system and only Tuesday is likely to be wet.
With the weather forecast out of the way, we made a move, and went to Fountains Abbey, which is a couple of miles south west of Ripon. Despite it being October, the car park was busy and we parked quite a distance from the Visitor Centre, though which you have to go to get to the Abbey.
Fountains Abbey is a National Trust property, and we worked out that if we paid £7.50 each to get in there, and visited a National Trust property every other month, that we would break even if we took out membership for a year, so that's what I did. Expect to hear reports of visits to National Trust properties over the next year as we make sure we get value out of our membership!
We got given a large welcome pack when we joined the National Trust, and as we didn't want to carry it around all afternoon, I took it back to the car while Stephen browsed in the gift shop.
From the Vistor Centre, you can see the top of the tower of the Abbey, and I took several pictures of it. As we walked closer to the Abbey, more of the buildings became visible, and it became apparent that this was a complex which would have supported a sizeable monastic community in its heyday.
As well as the Abbey, the site contains some lakes and some water gardens. There are statues in the water gardens. We particularly liked the one which we believed to be Neptune, as the figure was carrying a trident. (That's a stick with a fork on the end, not a missile!)
There was quite a lot of walking to be done, and at one point, we saw a woman coming the other way in full rain gear and I said to Stephen, "I wonder whether she knows something that we don't know..."
A little later, a very fine drizzle started coming down, and Stephen reminded me of the earlier encounter.
We had intended to finish at Fountains Abbey by 3pm in order to get back to Morrisons in Ripon before they closed at 4pm, but we didn't end up leaving the Fountains Abbey site until nearly 5pm. We did go into the centre of Ripon and got ourselves a Chinese takeaway for our dinner, then returned to the cottage to consume it.
The Jobo Giga One gave me a bit of trouble during the afternoon: when I tried to get it to copy a full SD card, it only copied the first 11% and then shut down. I suspected that the li-ion battery wasn't sufficiently charged, so I used a different SD card, and when I got back to the cottage and plugged the Giga One into its charger, it happily copied both my SD cards. I don't know whether I trust it to do it without a boost of mains power, though, so we're hoping that Morrisons are selling SD cards in Ripon for the same price that they're selling them for in Otford, where they are doing a very good deal on branded SD cards.
With a trip to the Beamish Museum planned, a trip into Morrisons first for some additional SD cards seems like a good idea now that the Giga One is a doubtful proposition for copying SD cards under battery power alone.
Stephen hasn't tried to copy any of his CD cards to the Giga One as yet. He's shooting in JPEG mode and isn't using up as much card space as I am now that I've switched my camera to RAW+JPEG mode. As I can see, even from the back panel of my camera, that several of my pictures have blown highlights and one or two have doubtful colour balance, I expect that I will be reconverting some of my pictures from the RAW data. That may be best done at home rather than on the laptop, simply because I would prefer to do that work on my monitor at home.
RAW+JPEG does take up a lot of storage space, though, so it's possible that the Giga One will fill up in the course of a week in Yorkshire, in which case the portable DVD burner will come in handy to transfer some of that data to offline storage.
Having brought the bassoon along, so as to practise the Pleyel concerto I'm supposed to be performing soon, having done my writing for the day, and given dinner time to settle, I'd better go and blow a few notes. All the typing on the laptop should have warmed my fingers up quite nicely for bassoon playing!
More from our October 2007 holiday in Yorkshire: Yorkshire Holiday Travelogue - 8th October, 2007
Back to Yorkshire Holiday Travelogue - 6th October, 2007
Autumn Holiday in Yorkshire & County Durham - October, 2007 - Travelogue Index
Autumn Holiday in Yorkshire & County Durham - October, 2007 - Index Page
Places Links - Yorkshire Index
Last Revised: 22nd October, 2007.