York

On Tuesday Jason and I took our first trip outside of Newcastle to York. It's about an hour south of here taking the train. We stayed for the day and had a great time. When we arrived into York we hopped on a double decker bus that showed us all the tourist hot spots in town. It was a wonderful way to see the city and not have to walk all that way to see everything. After taking one trip through the city (took about an hour) we hopped off at the first stop and saw York Minster. It's this huge Gothic cathedral, and was actually one of the places I really wanted to go to. I have this book called A Thousand Places to See Before you Die, and it listed this cathedral as a place to see. So Jason and I ventured through it, and it was truly amazing! Beautiful on the outside and inside.

After walking through the cathedral we walked through some of the shops, and one thing that is neat about York is that all the roads are cobble stones. And there were lots of cute shops and coffee places to just seat and relax. However, we decided not to take a break at this point and we headed to a Viking Museum on the other side of town. There we went through this exhibit and actually took a ride underground that showed us the history of York and how the Vikings influenced the town. The Vikings came around 975AD into York and conquered the area for some time and left alot of their influence on the area. This show was well worth it because it showed us more of York's history that we didn't learn on the bus.

Once we were done with the Viking Center we went to lunch and had our first fish and chips. Lunch was good, but the fish was a bit different and we realized why after I talked to my parents and they asked if there was still half of the skin on the fish, and now looking back on it there was! It gave it a little more chew, but still very good. We were happy to finally try the fish and chips and even more excited to eat out and not have Italian! :)

When we finished lunch we headed across the street to York Dungeon. There we were able to see several different "plays" that actors put on depicting different parts of life in York several hundreds of years back, including the plague and how they delt with the bodies, witch trials and law enforcement on the locals, and torturing. It was also really good and fun to go through because it was underground and was like a huge haunted house!

Once we finished York Dungeon we were pretty exhausted. We continued to walk through town and see the rest of the city for another couple hours. Then we found a place to eat for dinner. At this point it started raining so we headed to the train station early to get out of the rain.

Overall our trip to York was great! We got see another cool town just down the road from us and it was fairly cheap for what all we did and saw. Definitely a place to see if you're ever in this area.