What a lovely week we had 'Up North' on our quest to find a camper van. Our first stop, after a day of camper van hunting was at a service station hotel in Lecister on the M1 and with only 2km's to our destination the girls got their first taste of a real traffic jam as all three lanes of the motorway ground to a halt and didn't move again for an hour and a half. Thank goodness for the 'kids jokes' we'd down loaded the day before to help keep us amused during our wait!!!!

Next morning we had breakfast in the food court area of the service station which spans the now free flowing M1 before we head north to York.

   
In York we stayed in a lovely two hundred year old cottage with a very cute stable door.

 The first thing we did in York was to walk along the battlements of the old Medieval wall which once encircled the town of York.

The medieval wall was built on top of the even older Roman wall, and there are still parts of the old Roman wall visible

There are still two of the original four bars (gates) still standing,

 and this one had accommodation built into the upper floors

Parts of the wall now in the middle of modern York town with the Minster behind.

After a warming cup of hot chocolate we headed to The Shambles which is a medieval street that is incredibly narrow with timber framed houses on each side of a cobbled street. The buildings are so old that some of them are leaning all over the place and in parts of the street the upper stories are almost touching!

Also in the heart of York is York Minster.  It is Britain's largest Gothic building and took 250 years to build and has the worlds largest medieval stained glass window.  The window apparently has half of all the medieval stained glass in England!

York also boasts the house where Guy Fawlke's parents lived.

Some other lovely views of the old building in York.

The next day we headed back to York to spend some time at the 'Jorvik Dig' which is a really great educational area where you can have a go at being an archaeologist.  

We grabbed a trowel and started to dig.  

 The four pits are filled with finds from the four different time periods that have been dug up from under York's streets. The Victorian age, the Medieval, the Viking and lastly the Roman era.

 After unearthing the 'finds' in the pits you can go into another room and handle many of the artefacts from the different time periods, and you can actually get to hold some fossilized Viking po, the girls weren't too keen to handle that!!!