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Saturday was the day we had to go home, and the cottage needed to be vacated by 10am to allow the owner to clean it and make it ready for the next occupants.
We hadn't actually seen the owner all week, but she turned up while we were packing up. She'd had a busy week and had hardly been around. I thought when I spoke to her on the phone when arranging to pick up the key that she said that she lived in the rest of the barn conversion, but there never seemed to be anybody around and we thought that she actually lived in the farmhouse, but it turns out that she and her husband do live in the barn conversion and that the farmhouse has been sold off.
There were a couple of small maintenance issues in the cottage which we told our landlady about. One was an exhaust fan which didn't work, and it turned out to have a power switch above the lintel in the bathroom and somebody must have turned it off. Our landlady will add that switch's location to her information pack! Stephen couldn't get anything besides four-plus-one out of the Freeview set-top box and so was restricted to the terrestrial channels. Our landlady, Mrs Verity, couldn't get it to work either, so she's got that on her list of things to sort out. She did say that we should have knocked on her door and said something earlier.
We'd seen a lot of bulls but no cows in the fields around the cottage and it turns out that the cottage's owners keep bulls and then lease them out to do stud duty throughout Yorkshire. This time of the year, many of the bulls come home, but due to foot and mouth restrictions, they have less bulls at home than they would normally expect in the autumn. However, the foot and mouth restrictions are due to be lifted, so there will be more bulls in their fields very soon.
The cottage wasn't let for the next two weeks, but there's a booking for the last week of October, so cleaning the cottage wasn't a matter of urgency, but we wanted to get moving anyway. We didn't quite make it out by 10am, but drove away just after 10:30am.
Rather than going straight home, we made a side-trip into York to visit the National Railway Museum. The museum is free, so I said to Stephen that I wouldn't be surprised if the car park cost quite a bit of money, and we found that parking cost £7. That's not too bad considering that the museum is free. The Yorkshire Wheel is also on the site, and there's a charge for riding on that. I was seriously considering it, but Stephen wasn't all that keen, and in the end, there was so much to see in the museum that we didn't have time for the Yorkshire Wheel. I would have liked the views of York that it afforded.
The National Railway Museum is mostly indoors and has a lot of trains in quite a small space. Lighting levels aren't that great for photography, but we both have anti shake on our digital cameras, and that helps. As the exhibits were very close together, I got a lot of use out of my Sigma 10-20 super wide angle zoom lens.
The museum is laid out in several halls, one of which is set out as railway platforms, and in that hall they have several trains with waxwork models inside; and they also have three coaches from a Royal train which I think was used by Edward VII. That train even has a bathroom with a proper bathtub in it!
I didn't go into one of the halls. My feet had walked as far as they would go and I sat down while Stephen went off for a look. It was the hall where the Flying Scotsman is kept, but she's currently in bits. Some of the bits are there, but her boiler is away being overhauled. We did see Mallard in the main hall. We also saw Rocket in at least two places. :-)
It must have been after 5pm before we left the National Railway Museum and tried to find our way out of York. It was easy getting in as there were signposts for the National Railway Museum and we just had to follow them, but getting out was a little trickier. There's an inner ring road and an outer ring road and when we finally found a road which was heading outwards, it turned out to be heading further north than we wanted to go, but knowing that it would eventually meet the outer ring road, we just kept going, and when we found the outer ring road, we followed the road signs for Leeds. Before we got to Leeds, we knew there was an interchange with the A1(M), and that was the road we wanted to take south.
We stopped for petrol when we weren't too far from York. It cost 99.9 cents/litre for ordinary 95RON unleaded. Then we made another stop near Peterborough in a motorway service area, which can also be accessed by local traffic. We'd used up Burger King buy-1-get-1-free vouchers for their new Angus burger while in York, so we just had a little dessert and then drove the rest of the way home. There were no traffic hold-ups anywhere, although we were one of a number of cars who ended up in a works depot when we took the wrong turn off a roundabout near Blyth where they are making road improvements.
It was after 10pm when we arrived home. We partially unpacked the car, but left some stuff to be brought in the next morning. There were items in some creative places due to space being at a premium. The console box was in use for some small things, and when the back seat is put down, it leaves a void where each back seat is recessed and we filled up those voids with books before putting the seat down. Those fancy teapots took up a lot of space that had been otherwise used on our journey to Yorkshire and made packing the car for the return journey interesting!
I looked up my camera manual when I got home and found out how bracketing works. (It was really bugging me that I didn't know, and I couldn't wait until the next day to find out!) It turns out that the bracketing button works like a shift key. You hold it down and then the front and rear selection wheels can be used to set the number of shots in the bracket and the bracketing increment. There are still things I don't know about the camera, but they're mostly things to do with printing and with in-camera conversion of RAW files. I'm probably not all that interested in printing directly from the camera, but the RAW file conversion options might be of interest. I'll have to study them before going away without my manual again - or maybe I should just start packing my manual or at least taking an electronic copy with me!
More from our October 2007 holiday in Yorkshire: Yorkshire Holiday October, 2007 - Summaries Index
Back to Yorkshire Holiday Travelogue - 12th October, 2007
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Last Revised: 22nd October, 2007.