We are now (Wed Aug 12) in our second home exchange in London. (Actually a bit south of London, south of Brixton near Tulse Hill and Dulwich. It's about an hour or so by train or transit to downtown London.) Since my last post we spent a few days in and around Leeds and then took a train to Richmond (west of London) where we stayed for a couple of days.
We walked York Gate Garden, which is a lovely garden near Leeds - once privately owned and now part of a trust (or something, I don't know all the details but they have a few gardens they maintain). They also had a nice cafe where we had lunch.
On the way to/from the garden we walked through the Scottish Woods, which we saw an aqueduct and the remains of an old mill from the 1800's. (You get used to running into this kind of stuff in this part of the world.) (We were planning to take a bus to the garden but it was delayed so we decided to walk instead!)
We did a day trip from Leeds to York, where they have most of the remains of their old city wall. Which you can walk around. So here we are.
This is Clifford's Tower, which we didn't go up because you had to pay!
Of course we visited a few gardens during our walk around town!
One of the coolest sights in York - the remains of St Mary's Abbey. (I don't know any of the history of this abbey, sorry!)
In a park near the York Minster, a bug hotel! (It's hard to read the little sign but it has reviews from AirBugAndBug :-P)
We did the York Minster tour including of course the 275 step climb to the top of the tower.
We did the full audio tour of the Minster, which was fascinating! We could have probably spent the whole day here.
We also visited a couple (!!!) of pubs in York - the Whippit Inn and the Slip Inn (these Yorkians are clever!) - which punctuated our walk around town. Here are the famous York Gates which was passed on the way out of town.
On Saturday we did a long walk from Leeds to nearby Woodlesford, along the canal.
I call this "Leedshenge", but it's just a pagan worship site built in the 1990's. Pretty cool anyways to just run into this random site along the canal.
On our final day in Leeds we visited the Leeds Art Gallery. This is either a contemporary sculpture, or Leeds roadworks is getting out of hand!
An interactive exhibit you could walk into!
In the adjoining Henry Moore Institute (Henry Moore was an honrary graduate of Leeds University) an exhibition of modern sculpture - "Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age". It was very "cool" and a lot of the exhibits were interactive.
We also saw a display of Mongolian Warrior skills at the Armoury, also very "cool"!!!
Inside the Armoury, lots of guns and swords, and of course an elephant.
Monday we took a train to London (Leeds to London Charring Cross) and then muddled our way to Richmond via the "tube", where we'd booked a couple of days at the Duke's Head Inn. (A fine traditional English inn! Came with a hearty English breakfast every morning and we made time for a pint every afternoon :-D)
We of course made a visit to Kew Gardens (the largest botanical gardens in the world according to Sonya). I was interested because they were having a Henry Moore exhibit and had dozens of his statues littered about the garden.
Also this giant "beehive" that you could enter and stand in!
There were also a bunch of plants and flowers according to Sonya.
Next day we did a long walk along the Thames River from Richmond to Hampton Court Palace. Along the way we saw the obelisk that marks the limits where the Thames River is tidal (much further upstream than I expected1).
At Hampton Court (we didn't go in because we were too cheap).
We took a riverboat back to Richmond! Along the way we went through a lock (which we never did on our canal boat adventure).
Here is our boat after dropping us off in Richmond. (It continued all the way into London.)
Final stop in Richmond - the Ottolenghi shop. Sonya has all of his recipe books and we cook his recipes all the time. He has another location in London where we're booked for breakfast on Friday, yum!
Today (Wednesday) we've moved into our home exchange, and we're having a "down day" because we're both feeling a bit under the weather. More news to follow in the days ahead!
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