On the Shoulders of Giants

Thursday morning, we began the very last of our long bus/hostel trips. This time, it was to York. My initial thoughts: What's in York besides an archbishop and peppermint patties? As I was to find out, there are also Vikings and lots of narrow streets. We tried to go to the minster (big church) first thing off, but they had a funeral so showing around American tourists was pretty low on their list. Instead, we went to the Jorvik Viking Center. Imagine Pirates of the Caribbean as a really low-budget Vikings of the North Sea, and you have a good idea of this museum. They tried to be really authentic, right down to the smell, so I was trying to smell my sweater the whole time to avoid the stench of urine. Yuck. I also learned that my name is a really really long one to spell with Viking character stamps. We spent the rest of the night wandering through York and its cute little tiny streets and going to a lecture by a famous Shakespeare professor (which was the whole reason we took the trip in the first place)

Friday, we picked up, went to the minster (which was actually pretty cool), were given time for lunch, and then left York for good.I must admit, I wasn't too sad to leave hostels with co-ed bathrooms, which really scared me when I was brushing my teeth and a guy came out of the toilet. So, next stop? Liverpool. There's a good reason there are no pictures of Liverpool on my camera. Liverpool is the home of the Beatles, who I've decided were compelled to make up great music because their city is BORING. We wandered around a maritime museum, which was actually set up very well, and another Tate Gallery, which made me homesick for London. We were going to go to a Beatles museum, but I wasn't going to pay 6 pounds (about 11 dollars) for it. We may have seen more of Liverpool, but on our way out of the museum block, we got whistled and sworn at by a bunch of men, so I decided to cut my losses and head back to the hostel, which quite possibly used to be a factory.

I woke up Saturday morning feeling like I'd been hit by a truck. I've said it before, but there's a reason that hostel and hostile are such closely related words. We were given a grand total of fifteen minutes to see the Preston temple/MTC, which is beautiful like all temples. I have more pictures of fifteen minutes of the Preston temple than I have of sixteen or so hours in Liverpool. Our next scheduled item was a guided church history tour of Preston, which I have to admit I was pretty grumpy about, because it was raining. Luckily, the tour guide started to crack me up from the beginning and he was kind enough to let us stay on the bus until it stopped raining. Soo....this is where the story gets really fun.

Tour Guide: Everybody, look at that Subway on your left. There's a street to the right called the Old Cock Yard.

Inner-Elisabeth-Apathetic-Voice: Woo hoo. It's another old stony street. I guess it looks pretty neat.

Tour Guide: Here was the home of some guy whose name I can't pronounce. Umm...Alexander Knee-boar.

This is the point where I realized he was talking about my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Alexander Neibaur, pioneer linguist and dentist. I kind of freaked out and started whispering "He's a relative!" to all the people around me and forcing people on the other side of the bus to try to take pictures of the Subway for me. Luckily, we got out and walked past it later so I have better pictures of the ancestral home than a big yellow blur. I spent the rest of the day so excited and happy to be walking where my family walked so many years before. What a great experience! That day was just awesome, from the tour to finally going home to London and watching White Christmas. Now, my trip is just London. No more day trips. I am actually really excited about that. Down with buses and hostels!