Richmond Castle and a Conversation with a Yorkshireman

We had a long list of things we wanted to do with my parents when they were here, and we would have considered it a shame if we let their visit go buy without seeing a castle.  That would just be wrong.  Right?

We drove up the road to a town we'd never visited before, to Richmond, and walked to Richmond Castle in the center of town.

This is my dad channeling his inner James.

We missed out on rain, but the fog was magnificent. I considered cloning out the picnic tables in this picture.  Without them it feels like this could be a picture from any time in the past few hundred years.

We climbed up the dark stairs of the tallest tower, and the view was lovely in the fog.

I was still reading Charlotte's Web to James at the time, so I was susceptible to stopping and taking pictures of spider webs.

I love the colors of an English town against the fog.  It's just the way it's supposed to be.

We ran into friends as we wondered down the cobbled paths around the castle grounds and then walked down to the rushing River Swale.  It sounded pretty ferocious with all the rain we had over the Christmas holidays.  Have I mentioned the amount of rain and flooding?  We're all still talking about it.

Speaking of talking about the weather, I want to record one of my favorite encounters with a Yorkshireman that occurred on a sunny day during the first week of the new year when I was picking the kids up from school.  The sun was making a rare appearance, and I was walking toward the school soaking up that Vitamin D when a man joined me on the sidewalk on his own way to the school.  As you do here, I remarked to him about how nice it was to see the sun.  He agreed.  But then I just took it a step too far, I guess, because I added, "After all those rainy days it's just SO nice to see it again!"  Yorkshiremen don't like to see you lose your head because he said, "Well, now, we could do with it being a little warmer.  Let's not get too carried away by a bit of sunshine."  Ha!

I'm afraid that getting carried away by sunshine is exactly what we do here.