Winter's afternoon in York

As per usual, a few inches of snow brought whole of our infrastructure to a grinding halt. I suppose the Council will be churning out all the old excuses like "it took us by surprise". Well did it? Maybe it did. After all, you only had a weeks notice :/

I made the most of it by followed the environmentalists advice ie use public transport and trotted off to York. Despite it taking longer to travel there than it would have done traveling to Timbuktu, I still had a nice afternoon out.

My fist port of call was the York Wheel in the grounds of The Royal York Hotel and very impressive it was too. This was then followed by a gentle saunter round the city for a couple of hours. I always prefer going to York on a Sunday as there are usually less crowds but judging by the number of people on the streets today, a lot of people had had the same idea as me. Some peace and quiet was found in the Minster Gardens which looked absolutely beautiful with it's thick carpet of snow and snow-covered trees. They looked to have had a lot worse weather than we'd had.

The beer in the York Tap  which I visited before setting off on my return journey was nothing less than superb as was the accompanying muzak. Blind Faith with Stevie Winwood on vocals: God knows how many years isit since I last heard that?  It brought back memories of a few years ago at the Old Inn at Gairloch when, having walked into the bar, I was greeted by an An Tealloch beer pump (one of my favourite beers) and Led Zepplin's Dazed and Confused blasting out of the speakers. It was so unsuspected and quite unreal.

The journey back was a vast improvement as well with the train going straight through to Bradford plus an added bonus of a 30 minute delay for my bus which gave me an excuse to sample the beer in the local Spoons. :)

All photos were taken with the Panasonic Lumix GF1.

York Wheel

York Wheel

York Wheel

River Ouse

Minster Gardens

Minster Gardens

York Minster

York Minster

York