A year ago we heard about the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) from the in-laws, and decided we should take them sometime. Now turned out to be the time, and I’m calling it the first of four gems we found during our week with them in Yorkshire.

YSP has been around for decades, so its a shame we’ve only now known about it and have seen it. A year or two ago they hosted an exhibition/installation of Andy Goldsworthy, which was apparently their most popular show yet. And having seen a book of his work whilst resident at YSP, I’m not surprised. Wish we’d seen it …

The current exhibition has more than 100 pieces by renowned wood sculptor David Nash. Ranging from a few ounces up to several tonnes, and laid out in very different indoor and outdoor spaces, there’s a marvellous variety. Mostly achieved with hoists and a armoury of different chainsaws, his art was accessible and interactive enough that it just made you just want to have a go yourself. Or at least that’s what I left wanting to do.

We stayed in Wakefield, which is pretty handy for YSP. On the Sunday we visited Destiny Church. This is sandwiched neatly between a brand-new hospital and Wakefield’s former “Pauper’s Asylum” which have now been converted to expensive apartments. They got lots of marks for being friendly, welcoming, enthusiastic, loud, and for having a good mix of ages and backgrounds. The sermon wasn’t great (waffly and didn’t show how he got his points from the Bible), but they redeemed themselves a bit by telling us about the next gem …

… eating at the Swan & Cygnet pub by the Calder reservoirs near the Wakefield motorway junction. Obviously popular, it had a more extensive menu of good quality pub favourites that usual, very reasonable prices, some local real ales and a good atmosphere. We went back there later in the week, and rounded off the evening by walking from it around the neighbouring reservoir, admiring the sunset and wildlife, but unfortunately failing to find the geocache by the weir.

We also visited York, which is too obvious a gem for me to mention here. But hidden round the back of the Minster I found a rather special place for lunch: Gray’s Court. We didn’t find out about its history, though it clearly has more than your average lunch spot. It had a wonderful longroom full of old sofas to relax in, plus the option to eat outside in its charming gardens, backing onto York’s Roman town wall. It wasn’t cheap, but you could tell the quality of the ingredients; I’ve never had such a rich or filling Rarebit before, and Martha had the best-presented and tastiest Smoked Salmon and Scrambled Eggs.

Finally we chanced on the Fox & Hounds pub next to Newmillerdam Country Park, where we had a most excellent and filling lunch. Worth the (rather long) wait.

We’re back safely from a week staying with the Iona Community on the small Inner Hebridean island of Iona. We stayed in the Abbey along with 80 or so other supporters of Greenbelt.

We had a great time, but have come back fairly tired still: living in Temporary Community for a week is a fairly full-on experience. Particularly for us introverts.

Still, I managed a week without laptop or internet, which is the first for a long time …

We’ve had 4 days away, which scored well on our scale for ‘getting away from home’, and ‘relaxing’, though not everything ran smoothly.

The accommodation was a simple apartment at Weston Sands (“Luxury Living in the Heart of England”) a few miles south of Stratford-upon-Avon. There were 5 units in a converted barn next to a farm, overlooking fields with sheep. The idea was great, and the looked very charming, but the actual execution didn’t quite succeed:

• the bedroom with 2 large windows and vertical slat blinds that let in lots of light
• the double bed mattress was lumpy and somewhat uncomfortable
• the bed frame squeaked almost every time you moved a muscle — so not much sleep
• the living space which didn’t have a window, but could have looked out on the fields
• in our ground floor apartment (the only one like it) we could hear every movement going on in the apartment above us
• there was no-one on site to correct things like a running out of loo roll part way through the week, which is just demeaning when you’re a guest somewhere
• this single bedroom apartment was poor value (per person) compared to the 2- and 3-bedroom apartments in the rest of the place.

So, not great for us; we hope the other apartments were better.

We also messed up, failing to bring our wash bag, our travel Scrabble, Martha’s reading book, and various other small things that would have made our time a little easier. (Next time I won’t try to short-circuit things by trying to go away without looking at a list I have — I know, I know, but they do work.)

The local village was Welford-on-Avon, which boasts just one shop, a church, several pubs and a weirdly tall Maypole. The food at the Four Alls was good, and relatively cheap, and the menu was simple and family-friendly. The best meal was at the Bell Inn in Welford-on-Avon, which had an extensive menu, and was quite pricey, but with quality to match. Martha was in seventh heaven to find somewhere that served ‘proper’ bread and butter pudding — ie, made with bread and custard, not just a bread pudding served with custard.

On the first day we really got some exercise. From our little apartment, we walked 3 miles or so up the disused railway line (known as The Greenway) to the historic heart of Stratford, finding a geocache along the way. We walked many of the old half-timbered buildings, plus the renovations underway at the RSC’s Swan theatre. (Trust us to pick about eh only week of the year when no plays were on in any of Stratford’s 4 theatres …) We stopped and sat outside with a drink at the Dirty Duck pub (better than it sounds) before enjoying the New Place Garden. In it there are ten or so large sculptures added in recent years, each of which explores characters from Shakespeare’s more famous plays. It’s amazing how the sculptor has managed to weave together faces and props and set decorations.

The next day we took it easier, and drove to more small villages on rivers; Bidford-on-Avon looked a good place to try, but having got there decided it was a rather ugly dump, and left after a few minutes. We had much better luck in Henley-in-Arden, where we pottered around for half the day.

Our walk started by checking out the Church of St. John the Baptist, where we discovered this amazing stained glass window, presented to the church by the town in 2000.

We then headed up to St.Nicholas’ Church (ca.1170), and climbed up behind the graveyard to Beaudesert Mount, where we couldn’t find any remains of the Castle, and then wandered down the side over some scrubland to the side of the River Alne, and walked along it admiring the backs of the properties between it and the High Street. Here are a few photos:

We lunched at The White Swan Hotel (serving since 1361 but now with mod cons like WiFi) and had coffee and danish at Matricardi’s on a very comfortable sofa. Both recommended. The Henley Ice Cream Parlour also looked good but we didn’t go in.

Several friends or family have or are wondering about moving to this sort of area: from driving around it seems Binton, Henley, Alcester, Welford-on-Avon as well as Stratford itself would all be ‘pretty places’ to live. However, whether they’d have enough going on to suit would be down to individual taste.

(I’m going through some months-old draft posts; better post late than never, I reckon. Sorry for the disjoint nature of the posts …)

We junked our plans to visit Martha’s Vineyard once we’d looked at the times of the ferries, the crossings, and the bus services around the island. So on advice from Rebecca and Alistair we headed instead for Newport, Rhode Island. In particular we walked most of the famous Cliff Walk that skirts between the ocean and the backs of the houses on Newport’s Bellevue. This was once the richest road in the US, full of massive mansions built for the likes of the Astors and Vanderbilts in the second half of the 1800s. The building spree stopped with the great depression, and most of the houses were sold off by the 1940s. (BTW, good stretches of it are a rock scramble, not just a cliff walk …)

We could imagine the Great Gatsby being set here (and we later discovered part of the film was shot here), and someone walking with us thought that the party scene in Meet Joe Black was filmed in one of the gardens. We took a hint seen on www.tripadvisor.com and parked on Narangasset Ave, walked about 2.5 miles to Ledge Rd. We then walked back along Bellevue Ave to the car looking at the fronts of the houses, complete with little signs giving some history. On many of them we saw that these houses were regarded as “white elephants” even at the time. Much money doesn’t necessarily buy much happiness or much sense …

We drove a few miles to Fort Adams where we admired the view over the harbour and to the Claiborne Pell suspension bridge, and read our books for a while. Our stopping point was a generic Best Western, which we reckoned was much better value than the posh-ish Royal Sonesta we’d stayed at in Boston.

There’s been one thing that’s puzzled us so far: a number of houses have had large 5-pointed wooden stars painted red fixed to them. We haven’t yet worked out what they’re supposed to signify …

We went for 2 walks – first starting at Horsebridge and the second around Tytherley. As we mosyed slowly around the second we saw lots of unusually-shaped trees. Despite Tim’s iPhone being sometimes in signal range, we couldn’t work out what all of them were, but we suspect a type of Cypress and Elm. This was the most striking:

Near it is a church, which had this weather-vane atop its spire:

Why a rooster? The preacher on Sunday had just happened to explain this: its a reminder of Peter’s denial of Christ. Yes, the same St.Peter who God then used to found the church, which is somewhat encouraging for this rest of us failure-prone followers of Christ.

The start and end of this walk was the Star Inn, Tytherley, where we had an excellent pint of Hidden Old Sarum bitter before an excellent meal.

Many thanks to Tim and Ann for a great few days – good food, great company, and space to chill.

Here are a few more pics from our gallery

We then moved to the rather splendid Ranvilles Farm B&B as a basis for the rest of our tour. It’s one of those old houses where nothing’s quite straight or level, and shows the character of its cheerful owners (in this case huge cricket fans). Slightly bizarrely, our 16th century room had a wet room hidden in what looks like a cupboard in the corner of the room.

Sam’s dedication saw the opportunity for another family gathering in Bristol. Martha, myself and my parents decided to make a weekend of it. We stayed together at 9 Princes Buildings B&B in Clifton, just down from the Avon Gorge Hotel, with similarly great views out over the Avon Gorge.

Our hosts, the Fullers, were charming, as was the house. With lots of thoughtful touches, and a great breakfast, the only possible thing to complain about was that the sherry waiting for us in the rooms was an Amontillado, not Croft Original.

We took their advice and went down to Hotwells and caught the ferry into the city centre, which was fun, and itself had some surprisingly good views:

We visited the amazing Valley of the Rocks just up from Lee Abbey at Lynton in Devon. I’d looked up the details and found a few geocaches in the area, and had jotted down the coordinates.

The first, The Valley of Rocks was too hard to start with, being the smallest possible size — a keyring hidden under an overhanging rock. I think I hadn’t quite figured the subtle difference between two types of coordinate representations either, and so I could have been 30m off. Dispiriting, as I climbed most of the White Lady rock the hard way to find it.

The second wasn’t far away, even higher up, called Beachcombers Treasure. The instructions were misleading, suggesting a moderate hill walk. Not from where I started, going 300m straight up a 1:1 hill covered with bracken and brambles. At this point I still hadn’t been able to get the Garmin GPS to accept a waypoint of my choosing, despite reading the manual twice. Most weird user interface. This meant I was having to mentally compare the current coordinates with a set in my head, and work out with reference to the coast (which was roughly N) which way to go next. I didn’t find it; I think in the end I transposed two numbers of the coordinate in my head. Well annoyed by now.

The next day I had accidentally found out how to set a waypoint, and headed with more confidence, with Martha to the third one, Old Baldy. Turned out we started from the wrong car park, which meant for a long walk up some difficult bridleways. Martha’s MBT shoes are normally great, but not on the terrain. She stopped and I went on, eventually getting to the proper car park, and then onto the cache location. Again, lots of bracken, brambles, and extra spiky gorse to contend with. Running short on time, I couldn’t find it, despite knowing from the GPS I was within the necessary 6m. Shown is the route we landed up taking (courtesy of Google Earth), and then the cache’s general location.

Finally, finally, finally, a success. Exmoor TB Lodge was in a lovely wooded location, only a few hundred metres from an obvious carpark, and almost on the level. Here’s a silly picture of Martha blowing bubbles from a tube left in the cache. The cache itself is sitting on a handy nearby log, along with the GPS unit. We updated the log, picked up a TravelBug which we’ll move to our next succesful find, and then tired and weary, but happy, turned for home.

We took it easy in Toronto, spending some time just reading and people watching in Queens Park: sitting around in the warmth in shirtsleeves just makes us feel good.

Other good finds include Tim Horton’s (a chain of very good value coffee shops which are half-way to being cafes as well) and Second Vinyl where we spent a happy hour finding lots of second-hand jazz and classical CDs. The former are quite common around the city; the latter is at 10 Wellesley St West.

Urbana Coffee was also a rare find at 1033 Bay Street, having free wireless, friendly service, and fair trade coffee, unlike the Starbucks everywhere around.

Finally, we had a lovely meal listening to light jazz (and more Elton John!) at Le Saint Tropez in the Theatre district, as recommended by Trip Advisor.

We thought we should try some sushi at some point, and walked past Grand Ichiban Sushi at 345 Adelaide St West at a hungry point. We were impressed with the Bento that we had, and how it was presented. I don’t think we had really graduated to proper sushi with this – certainly everything was cooked – but it reminded us again how great miso soup is, and that we need to find the ingredients when we’re back home.

We then spent a long time in Lorne’s Coats – a store simply selling women’s coats, with lots of enthusiastic and helpful staff. Recommended, if that’s what you need – at 101 Spadina Ave.

Less good was discovering that the Ontario Art Gallery is shut for redevelopment – only after we’d walked there. Still, it will clearly look rather special on the outside when its ready in November. Bit late for us, though.