Hawes

Just under twenty years ago, I was working on a contract in London. During that time, I stayed with my parents and one evening I decided to borrow the car and pop over to visit my brother in Ealing, which was about nine miles away. I say "pop over" but the journey took an hour and a half. 

Normally, of course, I live somewhere so rural that the reverse is usually true, whereby I can cover longish distance in relatively short times. That doesn't stop places being quite far away in my head, though. So, while I think of Hawes as being quite some distance, it's actually less than twenty miles and only forty minutes in the car.

The Minx and I were working together, today, so we decided to have breakfast in Hawes, timing out journey so that we'd arrive at nine-thirty, a time when it seemed safe to assume there would be a a café or two open and, indeed, that was the case. 

After breakfast we took a mooch around the town and saw enough - not least a great little Indian restaurant - for us to decide we'd like to come back and stay. We were walking back to the car when we saw what looked like a railway bridge, which, at the moment, is like catnip to me. We walked up and, indeed, there was the old Hawes station, complete with a steam train and carriages.

There's no rail track now, apart from the section that the train is resting on, but I took a short walk under the bridge following the old line. However, I quickly came to a river, where the remnants of the old railway bridge could be seen. I took my Extra on the way back (an echo of yesterday's, as it turned out).

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-11.8 kgs
Reading: 'Girl, Woman, Other' by Bernadine Evaristo