Wednesday, 7 Nov: Haltwhistle, Housesteads, Hexham, and Our Adventures in Newcastle

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I'm still procrastinating, so here's another entry from my Reading Week trip.

On Wednesday, we got up and had a full English breakfast, which was wonderful. Then we caught the bus out to a little town called Haltwhistle and took another bus out to Housesteads, which has an old Roman fort (Vercovicium) on Hadrian's Wall. So that was pretty cool. It was bright and sunny out, as well, and there were, of course, a bunch of sheep around. Then we went back to Haltwhistle and caught the train to another town called Hexham. There, we went to see an old abbey founded by St. Wilfred. It was really cool. After having dinner, we went to a Choral Evensong service there. Most of the people in attendance were really surprised that anyone under the age of 40 was even there, so a bunch of people came up to talk to us. It was really nice. But I've got to say, the Church of England says the Apostle's Creed and the Lord's Prayer funny. The words are all changed, which really confused me. I really enjoyed going to the service, though, because services are so much cooler in cathedrals. Also, it was really nice to meet people who aren't students, because when all the people you interact with regularly are students, you sort of forget that real life exists.

Then we got on the train to Newcastle. At this time, Catie told me that she didn't actually know where in Newcastle our inn was. It was about 9:00 at night, and I really didn't want to wander the streets that late at night. So she called around Newcastle, trying to find directions. No one had ever heard of this place before. So we decided to go directly on to York, as we hadn't planned on touring Newcastle anyway. We bought our tickets and sat waiting for the train. Then, Catie gets a call from the inn. Where were we? Since the cancellation fee was less than our tickets, Catie cancelled (and she's picking that up. It's her fault, so I'm not going to pay. In the future, I'm going to make sure we're more prepared than that). So we went straight on to York--fortunately, our hostel there had rooms open a day early, so we got to York around 12:00-1:00 in the morning. So that was fun.

You can see I have graced you with another picture of sheep. I absolutely love seeing sheep all over these old ruins. I think it's fantastic. Life goes on, I guess.

In other news, I take really crappy pictures indoors. My hands shake a lot and my camera doesn't like low light. So half of my pictures really ought to be tossed, but I'm not going to get rid of them.