UK 6: The final day at York

Halfway between Edinburgh and the London Airport is York.  Luckily, they have a facility to store your luggage right near the train station.  I picked York because of its location, but also because it had the longest castle walls in England, measuring at 3.4 km long.  It was one of the warmest days we'd had, and sunny.  Unfortunately, it was a cold night, and so there was some ice on the walls, and they closed it down for the day.  This was very disappointing to say the least.

Although the castle walls were long, it was not like a Carcassonne or Obidos.  It was much bigger inside, and you couldn't see the walls from most parts inside.  With the walls unavailable, we made our way to the Shambles, a very old, small road in the middle of town that is closed down to cars.



As you can see, the road is now lined with three different Harry Potter shops, back to back.  It was pretty ridiculous and definitely took away from the old, beautiful surroundings.  We ran into yet another carnival here in York, that distracted from the scenery as well.



We continued on the path towards the massive cathedral in town, called the York Minster.



The price they were charging to enter was exorbitant, and I've seen enough churches by now, so we skipped going inside.

We headed to the nearby York Museum Gardens, as I was all museumed out.  The gardens weren't huge, but they were a nice place to walk on a sunny day.  There were some church ruins here that were beautiful.



Without the walls to occupy our time, we needed to find something else to do.  York was occupied by the Vikings for a period of time, and they have a small excavation site with a small ride, so we headed over.  The first room had a see through floor, showing part of the excavation site.  The next room had us boarding a small ride that brought us through recreations of viking life in York.  It was pretty poor compared to Disney rides, and expensive as could be, but it kept us busy for a while.  As we exited the ride, there was a skeleton displayed, that they used to create one of the animatronic vikings on the ride.



Nearby was what little remained of York Castle, named Clifford's Tower.  It wasn't much to look at, especially if you pulled back your view and looked around the surroundings.  A parking lot?  Seriously?



We took the train to a hotel right inside the airport, in front of the departure gates.  The room was super tiny, but the convenience couldn't be beat.

In other news, I showed the anime tv show Steins;gate to Miles and Stephanie.  They both enjoyed it.  Near the end, something on the screen caught my eye.  We took a crappy screenshot to show what we saw.



As you can see, the building that we went to for the robot convention, in Japan, was shown in the show.  Miles and I found this to be very cool.