The Trek to Fountains Abbey

Day two dawned windier and rainier and colder than ever. I looked out the window and watched the rain blowing sideways and thought about how this might spice up our day.

It was indeed an adventure.

It started when Roo's phone stopped working. He walked into York town centre to get the phone fixed, but the wind snapped his sadly insufficient umbrella, so he picked another one of those up, too.  Meanwhile we girls climbed the hotel stairs and lobby couches to kill time.

Our plan that day was to drive an hour north to see Fountains Abbey--an outdoor ruined abbey--then head down to the Peak District, another two hours away. We checked out of our hotel not knowing how we'd manage touring a ruined abbey in a hurricane, but we had no alternate plan so we just hoped for the schizophrenic English weather to take a sudden turn for the better.

At least it wasn't raining when we got to the Abbey visitors centre. So we were feeling optimistic. From the visitors centre, we took about a half mile walk towards a forest. We took a path through the forest down into a sheltered valley, and there in the clearing of the valley were the glorious ruins of a massive abbey, destroyed and plundered by Henry VIII. The valley was peaceful, almost reverent, and sheltered from the wind. It was quiet and mysterious. I loved the place immediately.

Then the rain came back. We did our best to shield the girls from the off and on downpour. The ruins provided scant shelter. But I was too awed to really care too much about a bit of rain. I didn't regret for a second our decision to come. It was one of the most amazing places I've ever seen.

Shielding Penny from the elements

The abbey sits on a massive parkland that includes manicured water gardens and way at the end of the park, a tea room. We were feeling ambitious and took about a mile or more walk to the tea room in the nether-regions of the park. It rained most of the way, blew wind in our faces all of the way, and started pouring as soon as we stepped into the quiet tea room. We were wet and loud and the tea room was quiet and almost deserted. We let the kids roam and be loud while we ate a hearty jacket potato and soup and waited for the rain to stop.

It did, thankfully, stop. But we were miles from the car. So we decided to take a (somewhat) shortcut back. By the time we were pushing our strollers up a steep, rocky, grass hill and feeling like handcart pioneers, it was too late to turn back. So we pushed on, past this ancient church, across a field, up a road, and back to the car park. Just in time to miss the downpour that followed.

We were wet and tired. Now we had the drive to the Peak District. Thinking we'd bypass some traffic on one section of the motorway, we tried driving on smaller roads through towns and cities. Instead, we picked the most traffic-clogged, single-laned city in the world to drive through. And by the time we reached the motorway, it was also clogged with holiday traffic. We made some more ill-fated navigation decision that took us on to more traffic and by the time we got to our cottage in the Peak District, we'd been in the car close to four hours.

We had dinner in a pub in the cute town of Bakewell, bought some groceries, and headed to our cottage--the delightfully refurbished Vallon Cottage

It had amazing views, a sun room, and a big bathtub, but it also had a maze of tiny staircases and more delicate, carefully arranged statues and souvenirs than an antique shop. It was like each room contained a mighty chorus of valuable, exotic knick-knacks singing "go on, break me!" to the children's ears and "pick me up! Hurry! Before mom sees!" to their eager, clumsy hands.

We spent most of our time guarding or rescuing the home-owner's belongings, chasing Penny up the stairs, pulling her off precarious precipices, saving geraniums from being crushed, and yelling at everyone to stop touching everything and stay perfectly still!

 But once the girls were asleep, we spent most of our time just taking in the view :)

The rain was long gone and we were pleased.