It's a little less "picturesque" maybe...

 ...but this is my favorite picture from Grassington: a side street off the main square, stone buildings, and a couple of bicycles.

More Grassington

I had a coffee and a scone at the Stripey Badger. Worth it just for the name, but the scone was also excellent.

Grassington

We took our midmorning break in this village in the Dales, which is now famous for starring as the fictional town of Darrowby in the latest TV version of All Creatures Great and Small, which has apparently done for the Yorkshire Dales what Outlander did for the Scottish Highlands. Apparently the producers picked Grassington because all they had to do was change the signs on the buildings and hide the cars and it would pass for the 1930's.

Over hill, over dale

A few pictures taken with my phone from the van as we drove through the national park.

The dales are a series of valleys nestled between hills of moorland in the Pennines, and 95% of the land in the park is privately owned. There are towns and villages and many, many farms, with fields of sheep bounded by dry-stone walls, and old stone barns.

I was expecting something wilder and more uninhabited, but what I got was beautiful and bucolic. Also, our lunch stop was at the Wensleydale Creamery, where they have a free tasting room: Wensleydale with cranberries or apricots or mango and ginger, cheddar with caramelized onions or pickled onions or chili. I didn't need lunch or dinner after sampling everything at least twice.

The journey from York to Oxford yesterday was long and frustrating; the heat has caused massive problems on the rail systems, and I ended up taking an Uber from Birmingham after my train to Oxford was cancelled and the next trains were repeatedly delayed. But I got here. I checked into my hotel, successfully retrieved my suitcase from storage, and was only twenty minutes late to dinner with a Merton friend. I'm moving into Merton this afternoon and will be happy to stay put for the next three weeks.

Sunday bird blogging

A great horned owl from the aviary at Bolton Castle in North Yorkshire. This feel like a bit of a cheat, since not only was the bird a captive, it was also on the wrong continent. (Great horned owls are only native to the Americas.)

I got out of York for the day yesterday. Last summer I'd booked a day trip to the Yorkshire Dales from York, but I decided to skip it this year when I was rebooking everything. I reasoned that there was enough to do in the city and I wanted a more relaxed schedule. But when I was sitting in my hotel room Friday night after the hot, crowded day that felt 72 hours long, I thought, Hmm, I wonder if it's too late to book that trip to the Yorkshire Dales?

It wasn't, and it turned out that a day driving through beautiful countryside and charming villages was exactly what I needed. It wasn't quite as hot yesterday, but outside of the city the weather was merely pleasantly warm, and we saw sheep and ate a lot of cheese and visited this castle, where Mary Queen of Scots was held prisoner for six months in 1568. (I did not attempt to climb the series of stone spiral staircases going up to the chamber where she lived. It would have taken me longer than six months to get down again.)

I've really lost all sense of time. The Minster bells have been ringing nonstop for the past half hour and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that it was Sunday.

Looking towards heaven

Just outside the Quire, looking up at the vaulted ceiling underneath the central tower.

I won't be getting my Yorkshire pictures sorted and processed any time soon, but I looked for this one because I remember taking it and thinking, Oh I like this. That ceiling is almost 200 feet high, and looking up at it literally made me giddy. (I started to fix the distortion in the central part of the ceiling, which should be square, but decided to leave it because seemed like the image should be as dizzy as I was.)

The Quire

York Minster

I started to write “I got to York yesterday” then stopped. That can't be right. But yes, I got here yesterday, but for some reason it feels much longer.

It's quite hot, for one thing, and though I was surprised and grateful to find a small portable AC unit and a Dyson fan in my hotel room, they are taking up most of the free floor space in a room that wasn't that big to begin with.

The other nice thing about this hotel is the location—I knew it was close to York Minster, the famous cathedral, but wasn't expecting the impact of having that enormous magnificence in my face every time I stepped outside, grabbing all of my attention the way the AC unit has grabbed all of my hotel room.

I spent some time wandering around there this afternoon, enjoying the relative cool along with the really wonderful architecture, and then went back for Evensong this evening. It wasn't surprising that the service matched the surroundings: exquisite harmonies in a chamber behind the main church called the Quire (Choir) that's bigger than most churches.

I'd been feeling kind of indifferent about York; it's beautiful, and if the old streets around the Minster have far too many of the dreaded cobblestones, they're charming, and at least there are no hills. But it's very crowded, and very hot, and going anywhere and seeing anything seems to require So Much Effort.

Not the Minster, though. That's worth it.

Brontë Parsonage

I spent the morning in the parsonage museum. Though I had seen some of the exhibits in New York several years ago, it was definitely very different seeing them in the rooms where the family actually lived. I'm too tired to post much tonight—it was hot today, and I tried, mostly successfully, to walk a little on the footpath behind the parsonage and through the field full of sheep beyond.

This was something I hadn't seen before and I found it very moving: Charlotte Brontë's wedding bonnet and veil.

She was such a complicated person; brilliant, yes, but petty and self-righteous and occasionally dishonest. She was an artist, who turned her tragic family history into literature, but also used it as kind of a performance when her growing fame brought her into contact with women she admired and wanted to impress. (Maybe it eased her crippling shyness and consciousness of how physically unattractive she was. People described her as a strange small woman with missing teeth and tiny hands. Most of them didn't really like her.)

Her friends and her father were disapproving of her decision to marry her father's curate when she was 38 years old, but it actually gives me more sympathy for her, when so many of her actions inspired an active dislike. To have lost all of her siblings, to find herself alone in the parsonage except for her father, and to have this chance. Why wouldn't she take it?

And she was apparently quite happy, but died less than a year later from pregnancy complications in the room where I saw this bonnet this morning.

Haworth

What a charming place.

I meant to come here last summer, after the Brontë course at Merton, when I still remembered all the ins and outs of the novels and the family history, but I got sick and went home early.

So I decided to try again this year, and do it before the program starts next week. It was easy to plan—I booked the same hotels I'd reserved last year, adding a couple of extra nights so I could go slow on my bad knee. And since I'm coming back to Oxford afterwards, unlike last year when I planned to go to London from Yorkshire and then home, I don't have to carry a month's worth of luggage with me. I left my big suitcase in a luggage storage place in Oxford, and crammed a couple changes of clothes and some clean underwear into my backpack.

I had to take three trains and a taxi to get here from Oxford, and delays caused by a strike meant that I had to hobble as fast as I could to platforms on the other side of every train station and I still missed both of my connections, but at least I wasn't dragging a suitcase.

The train I finally caught for the last leg, from Leeds to Keighley, was extremely local. We stopped every five minutes at places with names like Bingley and Woodlesford and Wakefield Kirkgate. (After having gone through Derbyshire on the first leg and blowing a mental kiss to Lizzie Bennet, I was amused to see another Pride and Prejudice name pop up. Why, hello Mr Bingley!)

But I made it, and after basically being held hostage in my apartment for the past couple of months with a knee that refused to navigate my four flights of stairs, it's reassuring to find that I'm still able to do this. Go places. See things.

I'm staying at an inn at the top of Haworth's steep, cobbled main street, and I can actually see the moors at the bottom of the hill from my window. The other picture is a footpath behind the Brontë Parsonage. The cobblestones and uneven ground are challenging, and I'm not going to be doing any hikes on the moors, but that's okay. I'm here.

Oxford

I did not think I would make it here. I'm not entirely sure I have.

It was hot and muggy (not New York hot, but hot) and I managed to get lost not once, but twice, and ended up walking more than I should have trying to find my way back to my hotel, and now I'm in that state of nerve-jangling jet lagged tiredness where I have to keep reminding myself where I am. But the photo evidence (a bridge on Castle Mill Stream) suggests that it is really Oxford and I'm really here.

Leaving New York

Looking down Seventh Avenue Friday night, towards Madison Square Garden where apparently some kind of wedding was going on.

The street closures had made traffic a nightmare all day—and it was over 100 degrees—so I cancelled my appointment at the DMV and spent the afternoon packing with the air conditioners blasting. I took this picture through the window of the Uber to JFK; the thunderstorm was brief but fierce.