York

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We left Rotherham early in the morning and headed into York. Like Oxford, it was very difficult to find a parking space in the York town centre and it was also very expensive. York also has both an outer and an inner ring road around the town centre, we ended up parking in a pay carpark just on the outside of the inner ring road. (The inner ring road followed the outside of the old city walls, whereas the outer ring road was of a much higher standard and was basically the boundary of the built up area.)

York is an impressive English town as it has a very intact city wall and city gates. We walked around part of the wall and visited the Richard III museum which is housed in one of the wall towers (Monks Bar). We learnt about the story of Richard III and the controversy surrounding his alleged crime of murdering his two young nephews.

Next, we went to the York Minster which is a very large cathedral. After this we visited the National Railway Museum which even Kerrie found impressive. It is free to go into the museum and there is a very large collection of stuff housed in multiple rooms. It is a lot more than just a collection of old train engines and carriages, there are also displays of how signalling works, a restoration workshop and even a viewing point which looks out over the adjacent main railway track between London and Edinburgh.

After we left York and fought our way through the traffic congestion, we headed towards the coast through the North York Moors towards the town of Whitby, also stopping off at a small town called Pickering where there was a castle and a heritage steam railway station. We ended up travelling past Whitby and stopping at a place called Stockton on Tees near Middlesbrough where we found a really cheap hotel located in an industrial estate.

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