The Fish Trail

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One of the coolest parts of Hull is the Fish Trail. Hull is a coastal city, and there is a path leading all around Old Town that is marked by different depictions of fish. It begins in the city centre and takes you to all the best sights, including Ye Olde White Harte, the oldest pub in East Yorkshire. Tia, Aurelie, Romain, and I were determined to conquer it, but the weather had other ideas.

Giving Romain the map was our first mistake. Feel free to insert your own joke about men asking for directions. We barely made it out of the city centre before we convinced him to give the now-sodden map to Aurelie. From the moment we left the visitor center it was drizzling, and every time one of us took the map out to check it the others would start laughing at the sorry state it was in. The fish carvings themselves were usually obvious, but some of them were cleverly hidden and required more than just a cursory glance.

Our route took us to the Holy Trinity Parish Church, a gorgeous building over 700 years old. In terms of European architecture that's barely into its teenage years, but to an American that's roughly three times as old as my whole country. America has a lot of amazing features, but the oldest of them are all natural like the Grand Canyon and Big Sur. It was amazing to touch the stone walls of the church and know that they had been there for seven centuries. The courtyard was covered in large stones, and I was trying to read the writing on them when Tia walked up beside me.

"I think those are headstones," she said.

"They're too small," I said automatically. "Besides, this is a church, not a cemetery."

"They used to bury people in the courtyards. I think those are bible verses on them."

Skeptical, I walked through the open gate and began stepping carefully around the stones. I took a picture of one, and in the split second that it showed up on my display screen I promptly lost all of my curiosity. "F*** this, I'm done!" I cried, hightailing it out of there as fast as I could. To all the non-believers reading this, let me make something clear: there was a light drizzle, but no fog and no mist. There was nothing that could have possibly caused the white form seen hovering over the headstone. Also, you might all be cursed now. Sorry.

We had to cut this first excursion short because the weather got worse, but we found shelter in the local shopping mall. We took turns trying on tacky accessories like sequined berets and oversized sunglasses in the department store, but by unspoken girl communication we all avoided the lingerie section out of respect for our one male companion. When we finally looked for him, we found him poking a DD bra and trying to get our attention, completely amazed at the article of clothing in front of him.

It took a few months, but we eventually tackled the rest of the Fish Trail. The weather was better this time, and we followed our aquatic friends all along the marina and down twisting side streets inhabited by hole-in-the-wall pubs with adorable names like the Ye Olde Black Boy. We found the White Harte completely by accident around fish twenty-seven, which should tell you how closely we stuck to the map as it was supposed to be our final destination. We didn't actually go inside that day, though I did visit it my last full day in Hull. As send-offs go, it wasn't bad at all.

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