We came out of our room in search of the lift and couldn’t find it anywhere – so decided to get the bags in from the car dump them in the lift and take pot luck as to where we ended up – at least we would be on the right floor. It turned out when the lift door opened it was outside our bedroom!
Pre dinner drinks was great beers including Demon Drink and Druids Revenge, the wine list was reasonable and good and the food was superb – Stornoway black and white puddings and lamb shank went well with the claret. Breakfast however was amazing – with a fabulous range of preserves and a Dualit toaster to make fresh toast for them, a huge range of breakfast cereals and a generous vegetarian cooked breakfast. That set us up for the search for Lud’s Church and the Green Knight (perhaps he turns orange for Autumn).
We returned to the Youth Hostel and discovered, now it was daylight, a footpath sign pointing to Lud’s Church. Followed the path, squeezed through narrow stone gates and over a footbridge to discover an orange fairyland – with an entrance of huge trees. The path was long and winding but autumnally beautiful. We finally reached the broken stone marking Lud’s Church and clambered down the wet stones into the chasm – which was very green – no wonder the Green man lived here. Chilly with no sound whatsoever, I urinated on a green stone in deference to the Green Man and we escaped the chasm onto a very muddy path which eventually took us back to the entrance.
I hadn’t been able to find my GPS so we asked at the Youth Hostel and had some tea to sustain us – I had to retrace our steps so we went back to the hotel and I was wandering up and down the kerb looking very suspicious near parked cars. When suddenly there it was nestled in a bed of autumn leaves and still pointing us to Lud’s Church. It was waterproof and still had three quarters battery life! The cars had missed it and pedestrians hadn’t liberated it – the fairies had been kind and returned it to me.
It was a long long way home broken only by my suggested places to stop and Kims refusal to see the Yorkshire Rhubarb triangle or the David Mach Darlington train sculpture – however she was swayed by the Tyne Pedestrian tunnels and wooden escalators.
The escalators are the longest wooden escalators in the world and a joy to travel at very slow speed as they clunk their way into the earth and to two tunnels – one for pedestrians and one for cyclists. The way back is up the escalator where you can see each step has a unique number (306 steps in total).
We stopped off at the Olde Ship Hotel in Seahouses for a pint of ale in nautical settings but were too early for dinner having missed all the traffic jams on the way up. So dinner was fish and chips at Pinnacles (the hairy bikers favourite apparently)
It was a rather long way to get back from Plymouth but it was a lot of fun and we saw a lot of Autumn.
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