25th June 2005 – Newcastle (Angel of the North) and Durham

The rain must have let up during the night, as waking up at 5am I heard no sounds of rain hitting the tent. 5am?! That’s right, but then I fell asleep again and woke up at 7am, 8am and then finally got up at around 9am. We finished packing the tent, and referring back to the days when the tent was too hot to stay in, Nav commented: “For all this, I’d prefer it to be sunny instead.”

We drove out of Northumberland toward Newcastle-upon-Tyne. We didn’t plan to stop so drove through and past it, over the River Tyne. Our next stop was York and as we headed south, Nav spotted the Angel of the North. Spur of the moment and we drove and parked up to have a look. Nav commented that it looked smaller (than originally thought) – I agreed, as I only remember seeing it on TV and it looked pretty huge from the helicopter views (although they do say that the television adds 3lbs).

Angel of the North – it’s smaller than they make it out to be, but is still awesome

Angel of the North – looking up, it is pretty big

Hmm, looking at that picture, maybe it is pretty big – but I think that I was expected something even bigger. We left and continued the journey. Because we were driving through Durham, we decided to stop and have a look around the city. Although it is a university city, it still has style and culture. We visited the castle and cathedral, finding that the university were setting up the cathedral and a marquee for graduation which begins on the upcoming Monday.

The cathedral was enormous, probably the biggest that I have seen so far on the trip. Inside, it wasn’t as impressive as it could have been, seemingly a bit empty for the size that it was. The design on the pillars and arches were nice, and also a number of columns were made of smaller marble and stone columns.

Durham Cathedral – absolutely enormous, just look at those tiny people and cars!

The castle was closed so we couldn’t investigate (although it didn’t look like much of a castle anyway). We did find, however, that students may well have been living within certain parts of the castle (as halls of residence) but can’t be too sure of this. It looked like a lovely city to be educated in and the town centre was nice too. Morton told of a single street of shops, but that has now expanded to a number of streets plus a small shopping centre. It was nice to see that there were more people out on the streets than in the shopping centre, and being a Saturday it was pretty busy.

Durham market, and in the building in the background is a large indoor market

I’ve not said anything about this before, but maybe it’s about time. Of course, during the trip we have to make stops to get food but there have been many an occasion where we decide that we can’t be bothered to move on and take a break for a while. This usually means that we have lunch (or a late or second lunch) in the car park and it’s quite good because it wakes up both up for the rest of the journey. So here is us at Tesco (York branch), Nav making the ‘fish-onion-and-homous’ sandwich. It’s nice to have a sit down and look at people looking at us (in disgust, probably).

We are off to Tesco, where will buy all out best food, la-lah lah lah…

After Durham, we continued to and finally reached York. We drove into (and quickly out of) a few more heinous caravan and camping sites. I wish I took a photo of one of them – it was pure evil and would have made me physically sick I got out the car - there was a middle green area just for tents, where stood a boy who stopped playing and starred at us as we drove past… shudder… We finally found one that seemed nice, although contained a lot of caravans and very, very few tents (about 3 including ours). I think that we’d both given up at that point and wanted to stop. York and Lincoln are on tomorrow’s agenda.


-- steven