England before Christmas

So on December 1^st Brian caught a flight from Malaga and landed at Newcastle airport in the middle of a blizzard. I guess his plane was one of only a few that actually got to land that night, most being diverted elsewhere. I met him with warm clothes and we took the train to my parents' place. He said it felt so good to be in a familiar town again, to be able to take a hot shower, get into clean clothes, and eat a real homemade English dinner. Since we arrived here we’ve kept a low profile. Most days Brian wakes up early, makes himself some coffee, and works on the book he's writing for a couple hours before I get up. He says it's nice to be making progress on it again. He ended up taking a longer hiatus from it than he had originally planned to, but up until the week before leaving Spain he never really had the motivation to write.

Every day we usually venture out at least briefly in the afternoon, unless the sidewalks are treacherously icy, which has happened a few times. We’ve also made a few longer journeys, motivated both by the need to do some Christmas shopping and to see the beautiful snowy countryside. There’s an inviting patch of winter woods close to my place that we’ve explored. And we’ve gone to Durham a couple times. We went there for the Christmas market and a carol service at the cathedral. Then we went on my birthday to do some shopping and to eat at a French café by the bridge. We both like the feel of Durham, with its castle and cathedral perched over all those zig-zaggy medieval roads.

A few days ago we went to the Beamish museum for one of their Christmas events. Beamish is like a place I remember in New England called Sturbridge Village, where buildings and artefacts from a certain period of history have been collected in order to reconstruct a town. In this case, the period is around about 1910 or so. We took the wooden tram (which felt like riding in a boat) from the main entrance to the Edwardian town, where we sampled a pint of the local at a pub sitting beside a beautiful coal fire and saw a demonstration of candy making. At the candy shop we also had a sample of cinder toffee and some chocolates. One of our biggest highlights was the ride on a steam-powered carousel, which boasted an amazingly loud fairground organ complete with little wooden drummers.

In other news, we’ve heard back from more than a dozen farms in Italy that would like to host us during periods between February and the start of May. At the moment it looks like we’ll mainly be in Tuscany, because that’s where the best response is coming from. We’re excited as both of our top picks have sent us invitations.

on the carousel

he looks Canadian

the steam carousel at Beamish

another picture of the carousel