Saturday, September 24

Norma, the Office Manager at Claymoore was kind enough to arrange for a taxi to take us to Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport where we picked up our rental car. In addition to being named after John Lennon, the airport has a yellow submarine outside of the terminal arrivals area. When you get off a plane here it’s easy to see how big an influence the Beatles have on this city.

The car wasn’t quite ready when we got there so we went to the Starbucks in the terminal to have a coffee & a snack. Catherine also took advantage of this “free” time to do some route planning.

We had planned to drive north towards Glasgow, Scotland and on the way take a side trip into Yorkshire Dales National Park & James Herriott “country”. Catherine & I loved reading Herriott’s books about life as a veterinarian in this part of England & the spectacular scenery featured in the TV series.

Our rental car is a nice new Ford Escort with a 6 speed manual transmission. It’s quite a bit shorter than the narrowboat we just got off but it will move a fair bit faster.

Driving on the left hand side of the road with the steering wheel on the right side of the car takes a bit of getting used to but I’m doing OK with it.

The M6 motorway was pretty easy because all of the cars in “our” lanes of the divided highway are headed in the same direction. That all changed when we got off the M6 & headed cross country to Aysgarth! Now we were on narrow two lane roads with no shoulders & often tightly bordered by high stone walls on both sides. Very beautiful to look but a bit really challenging to drive on. The narrowboat canals were spacious compared to some of the roads we were now driving on.

The scenery here is spectacular & I’m so impressed by all of the stone walls & stone buildings. It’s hard to imagine the amount of effort that had been made to “pick” & move all of those stones & to construct the walls & buildings.

We arrived at the George & Dragon Inn around 4pm. The timing was just right as neither Catherine or I had the energy to drive any further.

After a brief rest we went for a walk to view a waterfall nearby where a scene from the movie Robin Hood starring Kevin Costner was filmed.

The Inn where we stayed was great with lots of warmth & character. I even found some time to have a pint of the local brew before supper!

Cheers everyone! 🍻