August Bank holiday in Yorkshire: Sunday and Monday

Sunday morning I awoke to the hounds alarm again. Yet another bacon butty breakfast.

We popped into Helmsley, planning to get the paper and then head out for a drive. When we saw how packed the town square was by 10 on a Sunday, we decided to hang on to our parking slot and explore. We wandered into the castle as there was a display of medieaval life.
There are more pictures on my Flickr page

Sunday afternoon drove to Reivaulx Abbey - didn't go in. Instead we went up to Rievaulx woods where we had a picnic lunch in the pine trees before taking a walk in the woods.

Then more driving in Dales. We walked out on to the moor to photograph this way stone in the middle of the heather.

We finished the drive in Kirkbymoorside where we had late lunch/early tea at the Kings Head coaching inn. We headed back to the tent to freshen up and as it was dry and sunny evening we went for a drive up the dale across the road. Found this tree on a hill and had to take the picture.

A few minutes later we met a pheasant cock who didn't want to get out of the road. He ran towards the car and wouldn't move as I slowly inched forward. Sonia got out to chase him off, but he decided that he wasn't the one who was going to move back. So he moved forward and Sonia legged it round the car with the pheasant in hot pursuit. She made it round to the front before he did and hopped back into the car. I drove off because he was now behind us, but checking my rear view mirror I could see that he was chasing us off his turf. We couldn't stop laughing as we left him behind to reclaim his territory. There's no photos of the pheasant as I was too busy driving. We got back to thetent and spent the evening in the tent listening to the rain, reading, doing the Observer crossword and drinking the beer & mead we had bought in Helmsley.

Monday, woke to dry conditions so we packed tent quickly and headed for home. As we tried to avoid the holdups on the A1M, we popped into Ferrybridge Services for lunch. First place we tried was the Little Chef. Not a good idea "I've got three tables to do before I even see you" was the greeting from the manager. We sat down and I let Sonia know what I wanted to eat then headed off to the loos. Came back to hear that the manager would only take our drink order, she refused to let Sonia place our food order at same time. We walked out and went to self service section. After an "interesting" detour through Doncaster to avoid standing traffic on A1, we got home late in the afternoon.