When our friend Sophie invited us to visit for her murder mystery birthday celebration, we said yes without a doubt. We met Sophie on the other side of the world about 3 weeks into our Megamoon on the amazing island that is, Magnetic Island (blog – https://dowelltravel.blog/2016/10/13/magnetic-island/). We met a wonderful group of people on the ferry over and continued to have the best couple of days exploring the island. We’re still in touch with everyone we met there and that part of trip still remains a massive highlight. We couldn’t wait to see Sophie again despite the fact that it was a 6 hour drive to York from Plymouth.

We stopped over at my parents the night before, to break up the trip, and arrived in York by lunchtime on the Saturday. Sophie was busy preparing for her party so we headed into the city centre to explore. We wanted to walk in along the River Ouse, but there had been some recent flooding, which stopped us quite quickly.

We walked past York Castle and headed straight to our first stop, Betty’s tea room.

Whenever we visit my parents they like to whip out the Betty’s tea bags, after their visit to the Harrogate Betty’s tea room. I’ve always thought the tea was delicious and couldn’t wait to treat ourselves to high tea. Betty’s tea room is quite the institution, with the first tea room opening in Harrogate in 1919 by a Swiss baker, moving to England to master his craft. The York branch opened in 1936 designed after the Queen Mary ocean liner. The tea room hasn’t changed much since and with it’s grand piano, vintage decor and amazingly friendly waitresses and waiters you really do feel like you’ve been transported back to the 1930’s.

With our bellies full we walked to our next stop, the Jorvik Viking Museum. Jorvik is the old norse name for the city of York and the museum provides visitors with an opportunity to explore York during the Viking age. The exhibition takes you on a ‘ride’ through dioramas showcasing life-sized models of Viking citizens going about their daily activities. You experience the sights and smells of the time and despite feeling a little ‘disney’ it’s a great experience and we learnt a lot. The museum has recently had an influx of funding due to severe flooding in York in 2015, which caused the museum to closedown for a while. The whole place feels very modern and very well put together. Definitely worth a visit.

On our way to our next stop we took a walk along the city walls. York has more miles of intact city walls than any other city in England and they provided us with a vantage point to view the Minster in the distance.

We arrived at our last stop of the day, the National Railway Museum. Having grown up in Swindon, the home of Great Western Railway, it’s hard to escape the history of the railways. The STEAM museum in Swindon provides a great overview to GWR and I have visited a couple of times over the years. I expected the National Railway Museum to be similar, which it was. We moved through the museum and enjoyed looking at Royal carriages throughout the ages, as well as seeing more modern trains, such as the Eurostar, a Japanese bullet train and the world’s fastest steam locomotive, the Mallard, which clocked in at 125.88 miles per hour in 1938. It really is a great museum and I can recommend it to anyone in the area as a brilliant way to learn more about our country’s locomotive history.

We walked back to Sophie’s house ready and excited for the evening’s birthday festivities.

Simon and I were very excited to catchup with Sophie and despite not having seen each other for nearly a year, it was like no time had past at all. We met Sophie’s friend Cat, who was as lovely as Sophie, and started our transformation into our characters for the evening. We’d never taken part in a murder mystery evening, but was excited to become our alter egos, Edith and Hughes Le Grandbutte. Another guest was showing up later who was our daughter (a little strange). Despite us not solving the murder, we had a lot of fun playing the game, drinking, laughing and eating some very delicious chilli. Let me introduce you to Edith and Hughes…

The next morning was when our trip to York took a bit of a turn. If you’ve read a lot of my blogs, you’ll know that we love to go on free walking tours as often as we can. Usually free walking tours are led by locals or students and provide you with an insight into a city that they love. We’ve never been on a walking tour that we haven’t enjoyed. Until York. Unfortunately this is also the only free walking tour we’ve ever taken in the UK, but rest assured this won’t stop us trying others.

The tour was led by an older gentleman and the first thing he said to us was ‘this tour is advertised as 2 hours, but I’ve never done it in less than 3.5’. This was the first sign. We stuck with the tour for about an hour and a half despite being absolutely frozen. It was below freezing and we hardly moved at all during the tour, only covering about 500m in that time. Our second sign that this wasn’t the tour for us. It got to the point where we had to leave, something we’ve never done before. We had a 6 hour drive ahead of us and still hadn’t made it to the Minster or Shambles. The Gent knew his stuff, he knew more about York than I imagine anyone else knows. This was the main problem as he wanted to tell us everything. I applaud him for his knowledge and also for his commitment to the free walking tours, but this one just wasn’t for us. We politely explained our situation and left the tour.

We beelined straight to a cafe to warm up, and then walked around the Minster and the Shambles (which has 4, yes you read that right, Harry Potter shops, due to the fact that it looks a little like Diagon Alley).

We headed back to Soph and Cat’s house for another catchup before hitting the road. In 26 hours we saw a lot of York, we learnt a lot and we had a brilliant reunion with a wonderful person. It taught us that a weekend actually provides a decent amount of time to explore and solidified our aim to explore more of our own country.

104 days of our year are weekend days. Don’t waste them.