The beginning of the We are a long way ...... trip!

Beth and I began the We are a long way from LI, exploding bird trip to Yorkshire last Monday. We began our car trip by driving 3 ½ hours from North London to Leeds. Beth is one hell of a navigator and just terrific with a map. No sat-nav for her! I love spending time in a car with her. We laugh and sing alot and she updates me on new music. This trip it was Kaiser Chiefs, Artic Monkeys, The Fratellis and other groups I have already forgotten the name of! I did disappoint her though when I refused to stop at the Coal Mining Museum along the way. We missed Jeff on this trip and thought about him often while he was away in the states (yes, someone has to fund this operation!). Yorkshire is his kind of driving place. He would have loved the winding hilly roads. We will just have to go back with him!

Yorkshire has long been on my England travel wish list. After visiting Dartmoor in the southwest of England last fall I wanted to see the Yorkshire Moors. Many ex-pats live in the fear of getting transferred without seeing the places they wanted (and planned) to visit. I had not seen a lot of the north of England and thought I had better get a move on before time ran out. It was perfect for the annual mother-daughter road trip.

My preconceived ideas of Yorkshire revolved around books based on the works of Alf Wight (All Creatures Great and Small), Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited), and the Bronte sisters (Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre). I loved the TV shows and movies based on them. In my minds eye, Yorkshire is the quintessential English countryside. Picture the stone cottages, grazing sheep and green valleys dotted by stone fences. Yorkshire is spectacularly green and beautiful even in the rain (yes, it rained all week!). Beth and I would spent the next 6 days traveling over moors and dales repeatedly saying Oooh look at that, how beautiful and dad would love driving on this road! We really needed a thesaurus to find new words to describe what we were taking in. To set the record straight, moorlands tend to be open areas of boggy coarse grasses, heather, bracken and not much else! We were constantly watching the roads for grazing sheep. A dale is an open river valley in a hilly area. It was lovely to see steam trains chugging through the valleys giving tourist a first hand look at the picturesque landscape. Very charming indeed.

An additional purpose of this trip was to do some research into the Bantin family history. The Leeds/ Bradford area was where my great great grandmother Lavinia King was born (more on that tomorrow). By the time Beth and I left Leeds on Wednesday we decided we hated the city! The buildings were black with dirt and the system of one way streets made it almost impossible to navigate. While in Leeds we stayed at a hotel (Jurys Inn) on the Brewery Wharf. We were given handicapped rooms which don’t work well for non-handicapped people and parking was in an expensive car park blocks away!

For dinner we visited the Leeds Hard Rock Café. I have to admit I love the Hard Rock Cafes. You can satisfy a longing for American style food anywhere on the planet in these restaurants. For me it usually a hamburger! I know it conjours up images of the stereotypical American traveling abroad but I think I am allowed once in awhile! The Leeds HRC has clothing memorabilia from John Lennon, Elton John, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana and others. It wasn’t all that exciting! Beth was pleased to see something from a band called Everclear? After an eternity trying to get back to the hotel, we fell into our rooms exhausted. Tuesday would be family history day and the exploding bird.