School Trip

Photos: Digging at 'Dig' and sat on the corner of York's shortest street with the longest name.

I'm just back from the first of 2 visits to York with the school. Just like last year we did a tour of almost every museum there is, all of which sell the same crappy pens, fudge, bouncy balls, slinky's and mock Roman coins. Castle Howard is the posh stately home where they filmed Brideshead Revisited, but the kids were more interested in also being the location for Garfield 2. Jorvik is a bit 1980's despite it being all about Vikings. My favourite is 'Dig'. Here you get to pretend to be an archaeologist and dig up some sites. You also get to handle a 1000 year old pooh. The Minster is interesting and whilst I hate the idea of the 'religiousness' of it all, it is a huge building and built on the site of one of the UK's first churches, permitted under Roman rule. The 275 step up its tower are tough, especially after doing a 16 mile run the day before. One of our tour guides on the open top bus turns out to be the brother of one of the women at running club. Small world! We also encountered an old friend, Dave Asbury. Sarah & Rob came over to the bowling and we had another visit from the Viking re-enactment bloke 'Danelaw Dave'. My cloth hat was too small and so was the tunic, and I looked more like a garden gnome than a Viking. But it was a good week in all.