Thursday morning, we got up and took a train back up to Durham to go see Durham Cathedral. 
This was really important to me, because not only is there a shrine to St. Cuthbert, but the historian Bede is buried there, as well. Almost everything we know about the early centuries of the Anglo-Saxons in England comes from Bede. He founded the study of English history as we know it. Furthermore, I've spent the past 6-7 weeks thinking about, reading about, talking about, and writing about Bede, so I figured I ought to go see his tomb. It was amazing. It was really cool to encounter history like that. We also wandered around the town of Durham, which was really nice. We walked down by the river Wear. 
It wasn't too cold (yet), the sun was out, and the leaves were all turned, and we watched the swans on the river. After that, we went back to York, wandered the city for a while and stopped at the tourist information center, made dinner in the hostel, and then went out to some pubs. There is totally a store there that sells swords, including replica weapons from the Lord of the Rings films! Actually, they had one from the Silmarillion, too. Naturally, this was incredibly exciting to me and I stood in the store drooling for a while, I think. They weren't as heavy as I thought they would be, though. Catie wanted to buy a mace. Anyway, that night I had made plans to meet an internet friend of mine, whom I had met on a Lord of the Rings forum a few years back. He was in York with his history class on the Vikings. So that was a lot of fun.
This was really important to me, because not only is there a shrine to St. Cuthbert, but the historian Bede is buried there, as well. Almost everything we know about the early centuries of the Anglo-Saxons in England comes from Bede. He founded the study of English history as we know it. Furthermore, I've spent the past 6-7 weeks thinking about, reading about, talking about, and writing about Bede, so I figured I ought to go see his tomb. It was amazing. It was really cool to encounter history like that. We also wandered around the town of Durham, which was really nice. We walked down by the river Wear. It wasn't too cold (yet), the sun was out, and the leaves were all turned, and we watched the swans on the river. After that, we went back to York, wandered the city for a while and stopped at the tourist information center, made dinner in the hostel, and then went out to some pubs. There is totally a store there that sells swords, including replica weapons from the Lord of the Rings films! Actually, they had one from the Silmarillion, too. Naturally, this was incredibly exciting to me and I stood in the store drooling for a while, I think. They weren't as heavy as I thought they would be, though. Catie wanted to buy a mace. Anyway, that night I had made plans to meet an internet friend of mine, whom I had met on a Lord of the Rings forum a few years back. He was in York with his history class on the Vikings. So that was a lot of fun.Blogger's not been working well for me the past few days, so I don't know if this is actually going to post. And if you had checked earlier today, only to see a title and some tags, but no text, that's why. I did have a post there, but Blogger didn't post it.
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