Si and Cathy 's Journals

As we did last year, we decided to stay within England rather than trying to deal with airports and expensive hotels in Europe. As it turned out it was a good decision as most people flying out of Heathrow didn’t get anywhere because of the fog. We went away with Zoe who we work with at Southwark and her three flatmates. Si was in his element going away with 5 girls. He had great plans of some strip poker as he thought the odds were looking pretty good for him. Of course he was just joking and no, it didn’t happen. We rented a converted mill in Littlebeck, about three miles from Slights and about five from Whitby in the North York Moors. We headed away on the Friday and went via our favourite B and B in Hathersage in the Peak District. We drove up on the back roads and had the most fantastic scenery (that’s when it wasn’t just fog). The further north we got the colder it was and we were driving through villages covered in hoar frost. The temperature seldom got above 0 degrees. It made it look like a winter wonderland. We arrived in Littlebeck and were blown away by the beauty and quaintness of where we were staying. It had turned out to be an excellent choice given we chose it off the Internet. The girls arrived soon after us and we settled down to a week of good food, a few too many drinks and great company. We got out and about and saw Whitby, Scarborough, Robin Hood’s Bay and York, as well as having the most fantastic lunch at a Michelin Star restaurant called The Star Inn. The other highlight for me was the badger that came every night to eat peanuts. Although very wild, it was happy to come inside the porch and have a feed each night as long as you didn’t make sudden noises. You could sit close to it as they are pretty blind. It was great as lots of people have never seen one up close. Our only mishap was the little car incident – actually, I guess it was quite big as we wrote it off. We were driving to York on a road that wasn’t busy, not much oncoming traffic, going about 50m/h in a 60m/h zone when we came around a blind corner to find about 300m of traffic totally stationary. We didn’t have a hope in our Corsa (same as a Berina) which although they said had ABS, didn’t work. We ended up skidding into the car in front of us. As I was picking up my glasses etc that had all flown we were hit from behind by another Corsa no less. It appears that the airbags weren’t working either as they didn’t go off at all and yet the second car hit us at quite a high speed. The only reason there wasn’t a bigger pile up was because the oncoming traffic had cleared and everyone else behind us were able to swerve to the other side of the road. We were very lucky though as we weren’t hurt apart from sore necks (which are now fine) and the rental company was really good about it and gave us a new car. We got something with much better breaks after that – a Vectra. They did of course up our excess to 1000 pounds though which made us pretty scared to drive the thing in case something else happened. Overall, it was another lovely week of chilling out in the English countryside – James Herriot land.

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