Schuetz Family

We like to travel. We just don’t do nearly enough of it. So when our very good friends Matt and Lauren Conner moved to England, we knew that an overseas trip was in our future.Last summer, Matt and Lauren moved to England. Specifically, to a medium-sized town called Harrogate, in North Yorkshire. It’s a little north of Leeds, a little west of York, and about 90 minutes northeast of Manchester.

They’ve been back here for work, on occasion, over the past 12 months, but that doesn’t keep us from missing them &emdash; they’re great fun to be around, and Matt’s a good geocaching buddy. Plus, we’ve always wanted to see England.

After much procrastinating, we finally purchased tickets to Manchester, out of Dulles. Once that was out of the way, the rest of the trip sort of fell into place. We left at 5:45 pm on Friday, May 14, and returned 16 days later (at 3:30 pm on Sunday the 30th). Quite a long trip!

Day 1 – May 14 and 15 (Friday and Saturday)

We left the house Friday afternoon, taking a cab to Dulles. We got to the airport, stood in line (after line after line…), got screened (and screened again, our luck to be randomly selected), and finally boarded the plane. Several hours and very little sleep later, we arrived at Manchester International Airport.

We got to the car, and immediately Matt informed us that he had to bag a “locationless” Geocache on the way home. The way those work, is you find a target (like, for example, the “highest point” in a given area), take a picture of that target, and if nobody else has claimed that, you get to log the cache. He had found a “Highest Motorway in England” sign, and was going to take a picture of it on the way home. Of course, we got lost. Eventually, we found it, took the picture, and headed to the Conner’s house. They showed us around, we cleaned up, and then we went to a Geocaching event to meet some of the locals.

But first, we went to Starbucks. It was a quick walk from the Conner homestead to the downtown pedestrian zone in Harrogate. Matt, Andrea, and David went inside to order drinks, while Laruen went next door to the bakery for Yum-Yum’s (basically, donut sticks) and Sausage Rolls (light pastry wrapped around a soft sausage center). We went upstairs, enjoyed our drinks and pastries, and played “Spot the American” (watching people walk by on the street). The conversation took a predictable turn after Matt commented to Lauren that “you’re sure eating a lot of Yum-Yum’s now that you’re pregnant.” Once we’d exhausted that amazing news (it actually took us a while), we decided a nap was in order, and about an hour later, we finally headed out for the cache event.

At this event, the “Transatlantic Travel Bug Swap,” area geocachers got together at a pub to swap little trinkets that travel from cache to cache. Specifically, they wanted to swap bugs that were intended to go back to the states, since the people organizing the event were headed there for a vacation. We met a lot of really nice people, had some lunch, and picked up a few travel bugs (including one that was supposed to go to London and/or Edinburgh &emdash; right on our schedule!)

Then we went to do some geocache hunting of our own (and take in some of the beautiful countryside!) First stop was Fewston Reservoir, a lake situated in a steep valley surrounded by bluebells. We then went to another cache (a nice view from rocks in the middle of a sheep pasture) (did we mention there are LOTS of sheep out there?), and then finally to a cache at Ripley Castle. By this point, it was getting late, and we were getting hungry, so we went in search of food.

We’d eaten lunch at the geocache event (it was held at Toby Carver, a chain of pubs where they serve various kinds of meats under lamps carved as you wait, buffet-like). But that was, like, 1:00, and now it was almost 8:00, so we were quite hungry. Eager to further our British experience, we headed back into town and had Fish and Chips. The people at the restaurant were very friendly, seeming to detect immediately that we were recent arrivals. They even gave us a free side order of “Mushy Peas” for us to try. Turns out, mushy peas are better than you’d think &emdash; sort of like refried beans, but with peas. Anyway, we had our fish and chips, David had a nice beer he hadn’t heard of, and then we went back to the house to relax, watch an episode of “The Office” (a British mockumentary), and, (oh, yeah) sleep!

Day 2 – May 16 (Sunday)

We got up, had a quick breakfast, and dashed out into the countryside. First stop: A cache called “Viaduct View.” We parked on the side of a country road, walked down a muddy (but mostly dry, thankfully!) trail through the woods, into a farmer’s field, along a wall above a railroad track, and over a small bridge into another field. There, under a water trough, was the cache. David almost completely forgot about it, actually, because the view was so wonderful &emdash; a broad valley with a long, arched railroad bridge in the distance. After this, it was yet another cache, where David learned first hand what “Stinging Nettle” is (it’s a weed with tiny little needles. When you even just barely brush it, the needles inject histamine and formic acid under your skin, giving a nasty stinging sensation that lasts for HOURS.) Anyway, we eventually found this one, which also gave us the fourth and final clue for the Harrogate Hobble (each of four caches gave a clue that, when put together, give the final coordinates for a fifth cache). So we rushed off to find that one, and eventually found it, far up an incredibly steep hill just above a broad, shallow, creek/river.

[SinglePic not found]The Hobble out of the way, we went back to the barn for lunch. We stopped into Marks and Spencer for groceries (M&S is sort of a combination grocery and department store, with almost 100% in-house-brands). After some sandwiches, we drove out to a “Car Boot” sale (where a bunch of people pull their cars up in a field and sell stuff out of the trunk, which folks over there logically call a “boot.” Go figure.) Unfortunately, we couldn’t find the sale, so we drove back to Harrogate and dropped Lauren and Andrea off to do some shopping, while David and Matt continued on for some other caches.

David and Matt went for a cache high up on a bluff overlooking the town of Otley. This particular cache had given Matt so much trouble on his first visit, that he called David (at work), hoping for some transatlantic-hint-gathering. Finally getting to see the cache that had caused such a commotion was only part of the fun here &emdash; the view was absolutely incredible! After this, they went on a long hunt for several clues to a complicated puzzle cache. Then, they visited a small private school that had originally been a Morovian settlement, for a “virtual” cache (turns out the person who designed the White House was born here).

After the guys were done caching and the girls done shopping, we cleaned up and went to Betty’s for dinner. Betty’s is a Harrogate institution &emdash; part tea house, part restaurant, part bakery. We enjoyed a great dinner, watching a gaggle of hippies juggling fire sticks (really!) in the park across the street, then walked down to the pump house.

Harrogate owes its fame, and probably its very existence, to the presence of several mineral springs. Early on, Harrogate was a spa town, to which people would flock in order to bathe in the healing waters (which, being very high in sulfur, smell terrible!). To ensure that all could enjoy the healing properties of the water, the King established a public pump house with an outside spigot, so anyone could come up and drink of the theraputic Harrogate water. We tried it. Ick. Sort of tastes like seawater, only without the pleasant surf sounds. We’ll probably just stick with bottled water for now. We then went back home, watched Pirates of the Carribean, and went to bed.

Day 3 – May 17 (Monday)

Matt and David ran off to do some more caching (which ultimately resulted in them getting lost in the wilds of industrial southeast Leeds, coming back far later than was, er, healthy). Meanwhile, Andrea stayed behind to do some laundry and get some shopping done. We ended our first weekend with a great dinner at Jinnah, an Indian place just a block’s walk from the Conners’, and washed that down with an episode of The Chapelle show (DVDs that we’d delivered to Matt from a friend back here).