York

Our first stop on our UK trip was in York. We traveled here from Gatwick airport (south of London) by train. It was kind of hard to stay awake on the train after our long plane ride, but York was a really cool city. We left the next day around 2pm for Edinburgh, and I wish we would have had one more day to stay in York. It's such a neat city because it has remnants of all the different major periods of English history, from the Roman walls to Viking conquerors to conflict with the Scots...it's all in this town. We walked around the city walls (picture of Joe), and talked with a young guy that ran a tourist shop/historical center in one of the ancient gate towers. He told us some of the history of the gate, such as all the famous people that had their heads put on spikes above the gate, and the different remodels and purposes the gate had seen through the years. We didn't buy any of his trinkets or pay to see the top floor of the gate, but we sure thanked him for his free information.

In the town center, there is a little section of streets called the Shambles. It's derived from a tool the butchers used when those streets used to be the meat and produce market for the town. There's a picture of me in the Shambles, with its cute, tiny streets and dormer windows.

There is also a shot of me doing the essential English pose-with-the-red-phone-booth. The York Minster is in the background. We got a personal tour of that church (only Joe and I in the group) from a 90 year old man who had worked at the church since he was 20. He told a story about how there was a fire in the church back in the 1980s, and he hadn't known about it because he "of course wasn't on the phone lines then." I thought I'd heard him wrong when he said the year, but he confirmed it--no phone in the 80s. He also told us a story about the first man to come up with the idea of taking out tonsils (there was a memorial to him in the church, if I understood that part of the story correctly), and then he informed us that that original doctor was the one who took out his tonsils. He also demonstrated what that was like with very animated hand gestures. Let's just say that was the most unique tour we went on.