Postcard from the Garden Gnome: Enter Freely and of Your Own Free Will...(Part 2)

Day 2 of this little excursion dawned much brighter and Bridget decided we were going to follow Mina's walk to Robin Hood Bay (yes, he was supposed to have hung out there). Fortunately for Mina and Lucy, there were no highways in 1892. There are now, and lest we re-enacted our little St. Brigid's expedition and get hit by a truck, I decided to curtail this expedition. I did, however, let her stop in the East Whitby Cemetery (I can hear her mother snickering right now--"It's always a graveyard with her").

There were a bunch of Commonwealth War Graves there, mostly for naval men, and as it was Sunday, it was mercifully quiet and free of tourists (But Herb, there are 199 steps! I counted them! Who the hell put those there? It's exhausting! Oh, I need to rest for a minute here...). I also met a lovely older lady who was "visiting her husband" and we spent five minutes looking for a water spigot so she could water her flowers.

I tried really hard to convince her to be well-rounded. I really did. Whitby has some great history. Captain Cook served his apprenticeship there before zipping off to the Antipodes to antagonize Aborigines, and there a long history of sea-stories and whaling off Whitby.

Oddly, its sister city is Anchorage, Alaska, and there is a giant bronze whalebone near the shore that was sent as a token of... camaraderie, I guess...

But, try as I might, she was deaf to the calls of culture. And, in the suddenly pouring raid (you have no idea how nice it was to be in a place that was at the climactic mercies of the sea again!), we found The House Where Bram Stoker Wrote Dracula:

(He also worked on it at the Royal Hotel around the corner when his landlady kicked him out so she could sweep and dust, but there's no plaque there). As the skies cleared, Bridget went down and strolled the beach, scanning for any sailorless ships, giant dogs or tall men in incongruous tuxedoes. Sadly, none were present, but I had a lovely paddle in a tidal eddie. A note: the North Sea is really cold:

And we saw another brilliant sunset at St. Mary's. We sat on a bench by Caedmon's Cross and hummed for him. Caedmon was a cow-herder who had a dream that God wanted him to spread The Word through song. So he presented himself to (St.) Hilda, the Abbess of Whitby. She agreed to give Caedmon a chance and had the monks read him a psalm to memorize (since Caedmon couldn't read), and in the morning he delivered the first hymn in the history of Christianity. He wrote over 600 of them, and never learned to read a word. He had the monks read him the passages every night so that he could teach people the beauty of the words.

So all in all, I really liked Whitby. It's a phenomenal city for walking, it has a fantastic bookstore--I rate bookstores on the comfiness of their chairs and the length of time I get to sit and read all the books in the store, and this one topped an hour-- and a superb literary reputation.

...Did I leave her there? On a bench, perhaps, in St. Mary's Cemetery? Hmmm.....