Quiz Answer: South Church, Bishop Auckland
It's a church, not a castle, just in case you guessed that.
Bishop Auckland is the town where the Bishops
of Durham have had their home for nearly a millennium; they moved in in
about 1080 A.D.
The town is about 13 miles to the northwest of Darlington.
As part of our "get in shape for the great bicycle ride" we rode over there last week.
It was our toughest ride yet, made inadvertently tougher.
We took backroads in order to avoid the heavy traffic of the main roads.
That took us through the small village of Heighington, which we learned is well named,
being at a local maximum which wearied our calf muscles.
A few miles later Shildon was the same and did the same, even without such a name to forewarn us.
In Bishop Auckland we sat in the Bishop's park and had our picnic lunch while we read our newspapers.
Just as we were coming back through the center of town it was exactly the
one-year anniversary of 9/11 and we stopped to participate in two minutes
of silence.
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Family life has been the center of our activities here.
We've had the chance to visit the grave of Jan's mother and father a couple of times and add a few flowers.
We've gotten to see who is still a child and who is not a child any more.
Our niece Michaela passed her GCSE's with flying colors
and so goes on to Sixth Form College this month.
The older nieces and nephews really aren't children anymore; Mike and Chris are now both married;
Mike and Joanne have children; Chris and Sam have rabbits and a dog.
Cheryl has just survived being made redundant; and Lindsay has just started her
final year of a teaching degree in Manchester.
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Now our time in Darlington is drawing to a close.
It is nearly time to send our bicycles back to their owners. Our plans are made.
We've got tickets and reservations. People are awaiting us in
New York.
So we are now starting a round of what amount to goodbye dinners.
It's sweet to have them, but they do have their problems: we constantly are
looking at our waist lines and constantly wondering how we will finish
even half of the projects that we wanted to.
Most of the family gatherings this trip were not at our house, such as the one above,
in the back patio of the Atkinsons (Jan's sister Carol & husband John).
This one was to mark the August bank holiday, which as you can see wasn't exactly great weather
for backyard barbequeing.
Gerry (back to the camera) is wearing a coat and cold;
Jan is seated to the right along side the garage.
Our house was host to a party celebrating brother-in-law Mick Heasman's birthday.
Jhap Bates put her excellent culinary skills to work and decorated the salad with greetings as shown.
(Incidentally, we have been sharing the house with Dave and Jhap and she has made us some wonderful meals.
We came back to England thinking in terms of English meals and got an international
selection with a Thai flavor.) Soon we'll be hosting some more.
Gerry has committed himself to making enchiladas, a dish he introduced to the family a year ago.
It too became a hit.
Now we are less than a week away from being in our new digs.
Where are we going?
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