Snow in November

[shewhomust]

The year's first snow this morning, just a sprinkling but it covered the ground. We celebrated Gail's birthday with an excursion to the eighteenth century pleasure gardens at Gibside, promising ourselves some eighteenth century pleasures: do roast chestnuts count? We shared them with the robin* in the picture. There was a small craft fair, where I bought a few gifts and made the acquintance of Sandra from Byblos Jewellery ("I hope to have my web site up by the end of the month...") which could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Since Gail's bad foot prevents her from walking very far, we qualified as disabled, and were allowed to ride in the golf buggy to the stable block at the far end of the grounds: an interesting experience, and we were pleased to be see more of the grounds than we had expected, but a bumpy and a chilly way to ride.

So we took Gail off to the Derwent Walk Inn at Ebchester, and fortified ourselves with a large Sunday lunch. One interesting example of how the obvious is only obvious because you already know it: we gazed out of the window at the Derwent valley, and Gail asked "When you go walking, where do you walk? I can see roads, and I can see fields, but..." (The Derwent Walk runs so close below the pub that you can't actually see it.) So on the way home we pointed out fingerposts to public footpaths (but if you're an urban person, and you don't drive, why would you know this...)

---

*note for speakers of US English: that bird in the pcture is a robin. It's one of the birds which overwinter here, so it's often seen as a symbol of winter.