Malham

The days have been getting shorter, but so far I have really enjoyed that. It makes me feel less guilty about leaving work earlier. To me, it just makes sense that it's time to go home when it's dark and it's way better to go home at 5:00pm than 11:00pm.

Another great thing about the change in daylight hours is the light. When I drive to work in the morning, the sun makes everything look incredibly vivid; almost surreal. The green grass, white sheep, the trees with their yellow and orange leaves, and even the gray rocks are more vibrant. It's really impressive. Whoever said that England was a dreary, gray place wasn't paying much attention.

Things have been going really well at work. It's starting to slow down a bit and I have been able to work on more long term sort of work instead of the day to day things. Sports have kept me at work until about 10:00pm every night, but I am enjoying 'playing' sports again. I joined two basketball teams and a volleyball team. Football finished up a few weeks ago, which is good, because that one was outside and even with games at 5:00pm, we were running out of light.

This weekend Kate and I installed a pretty large mirror in the bathroom (up to this point I only had a 6" mirror for shaving), booked a trip to Spain, and went for a hike in the Dales.

The mirror bit isn't very exciting, but it's helpful. It helped me to realize that a new sweater I got is way too small. It's made of alpaca wool and is super warm, but it looks like a child's sweater. I probably won't be wearing that one as much anymore. Thanks mirror.

As for Spain, we were messing about online on Saturday and found a really good deal for a package vacation. For £260 (about $440), the two of us get round trip airfare (with checked luggage; that counts for a lot on budget airlines over here.) and 3 nights hotel in a one bedroom apartment across from the beach in Torremolinos, Spain, on La Costa Del Sol. Basically, the Brits don't really celebrate Thanksgiving, so we won't be missing anything but the chilly weather. I'll be sure to include an update on that trip once we return.

Today we went for a hike. It was a last minute decision to go and we were a little short on daylight towards the end. With that being said, when the sun was shining, we had that magical light I have been enjoying so much (the picture at the top of the post is a good example).

The hike itself was very pleasant. It involved country roads, trails, streams, cliffs, waterfalls, sheep (of course), a couple of small towns, and limestone rock formations.

The highlight, for me, was the Goredale Scar. We parked in Malham and walked first towards the scar. The book we had included some really great maps with terrain features and relief drawn, as well as clear directions and descriptions; however, the choice of pictures was a bit silly. For example, this is the picture they showed for the scar (this is actually a picture I took, but it's from the same angle as the picture in the book):


Not terrible, but why didn't they turn around, walk down the hill and show it from this angle:

Much more interesting from this angle, if you ask me. Or, since they would have been at the bottom of the hill anyway, why not turn around once more and take a picture that looks like this:


That happened to be a lucky shot in that the sun was doing it's magic, low in the sky, and the clouds broke for a minute right when the light was tucked behind the edge of the scar. This picture doesn't really give a sense of how bathed in light everything was. Nor does it show how huge the land features really are. For reference, you can see some people off to the left. If you ever come to England, it's definitely a site worth seeing and you can practically drive up to it, if you want to.

The rest of the walk was nice, but the main excitement in the geography department included much smaller limestone formations.

By the time it was all said and done, we had only been walking for 3 hours, but it was already dark (in this picture, it's only 3:45pm):

We made our way home and just finished out the weekend with an oversized chicken and mushroom salad with hot chocolate and earl grey tea. It was a pretty good day.