Easter Sunday, March 23
Crawley, West Sussex

Well, being in Britain on Easter Sunday does have one point in its favor: I finally have time to catch up on watching Strongbad podcasts. Also, I can get started on my own travel blog, which up until now I have left to be written by Adam alone.

Here's an entry written in the Dales on Thursday:

Malham, North Yorkshire, March 20, 2008

I came out of the bathroom to find Adam lying in bed typing in his diary, and I realized that I too wanted to be the sort of person who writes for fun. How else could one ever write regularly?

Up until today, Adam and I visited only urban areas in Yorkshire – these are safer, according to the odd logic of the urban traveler. But only in the rural parts can you get a shot like this:

Here, the Malham scenery is framed by a dark, dank, abandoned barn. The barn sort of reflects our mindset when we first arrived in this part of the county. After a mostly disappointing evening in Manchester, we spent the better part of the early part of the day fighting off the gnawing feeling that our trip to North Yorkshire was a terrible mistake because we could never bike to the village of Malham under the current weather conditions. When we left our train in the village of Settle, this feeling had become a certainty: wind lashed a light, cold rain against our face, and the narrow stone walkways of the village seemed to offer little solace. Our situation was never so bad as it seemed at the time, however. A few phone calls and one taxi ride later, we had confirmed our reservation in Malham. With our confidence restored, we took a walk around the village despite the inclement weather. There is a way in which the brusque winds, roiling the clouds over the Pennines, made the area even more interesting. We decided to attack one of the dales – softly rolling hills covered with mushy grass, moss and home to sheep, rabbit, and low stone walls. The bracing air had given us a new dose of pep; we scaled the hill easily. I took a snapshot of Adam as he faced the village from a new stand point, and even though I didn’t get him in focus, his brightened mood is visible in all of his features.