Wonderful Whitby.

Last Saturday, the 21st, we traveled north about 1-1/2 hours to a town called Whitby. There are several things that attract the masses to this neat town including the ruins of Whitby abbey, St. Mary's church, and the beautiful coast of the North Sea. The town is also famous for inspiring the well-known novel, Dracula, by Bram Stoker. Whitby proved to be the perfect setting to flame Stoker's imagination and help derive many details for his book. Lewis Carroll, spelled double R, double L just like my mother-in-law's name :), was also drawn to the town, and composed much of Alice in Wonderland while sitting on the Whitby sands. Another claim to fame of Whitby's is that Captain James Cook, the 18th century explorer and voyager, did his apprenticeship there and chose only Whitby-built ships for each of his voyages.

As with all of these small English towns there are lots of cute, little shops. It seemed to me that Whitby had an abundance of chocolate shops... so we HAD to experience at least one of them. We tried some toffee and chocolate mint fudge. Yum! There was also some kind of... I don't know what you'd call it exactly, some Medieval festival/Connor Prairie type thing near the abbey that we were able to enjoy. That's what the fighting scenes in the pictures are from.

For dinner, we went to Magpie, a famous fish and chips restaurant. The locals as well as tourists were lined up on the street to eat there. We were all very pleased with our meals... but I think I've had my fish and chips fill for quite some time! We left for home around 7:30 and called it a day.