Coming to you from Hexham

…where the internet is not great.

So this will be short. Not many photos to speak of. Hopefully lots more tomorrow.

This is the part where “flexible” gains meaning. I have no problem at all with being flexible and flowing during travel, but it just all gets more complicated in every way when you are traveling with others, even if the others are mature and flexible 21 and 17-year olds.

The reason for the need for flexibility? Train strike, of course. We did well today. It wasn’t a strike day, but we were warned all over the place that travel would be impacted on non-strike days as well. Well, today was fine, and didn’t seem impacted except maybe that the trains were not near full – and our York-Newcastle leg was almost empty until Durham.

Oh, and here’s Durham. One of the many places I would have liked to have gone to….

But…tomorrow. A strike day. But I think we have worked it out, helped by the fact that today we essentially knocked off all the Hadrian’s Wall sites we wanted to see which means we can get away earlier and give ourselves more time for strike-related stress. At another time, on a different trip, we would have taken a couple of days and done some serious walking between parts of the wall, but this wasn’t that trip. What we saw was great and fun, and I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow, along with more about York and then, hopefully…another thing. Which hopefully we will get to tomorrow.

So until then, a couple of things:

I misspoke in a previous post when I declared that the sun sets around 10 and rises around 6. I was awakened by the sun this morning, blinked, looked at my phone….

4:09 AM.

Insane.

Secondly, from York Minster yesterday. I’ve seen a lot, but I’d never seen this:

Also, the most entertaining aspect of Brit-talk to me is the almost universal service person (cashier, server) greeting of “Hiya!”

Will be adopting it immediately so get ready.

In the meantime: Cheers!