4 September 2023 - New Roads and a Fabulous Beach
Miles driven today = 99
Total Miles to date = 227
We had a very peaceful night at the Louth Cattle Market and were only disturbed from our slumbers this morning by some road noise courtesy of a few early risers heading off to work. It's 2 years now since I retired and, thanks to Covid, more like 3 and a half years since I commuted regularly so in all honesty I've pretty much forgotten what it was like to have to set an alarm clock every morning in order to go and work for The Man.
Today's journey was almost entirely on roads I have never driven before and was an absolute joy from start to finish. We've completely avoided motorways altogether thus far and I doubt the sum total of dual carriageways has surpassed 10 miles. We took the A16, A18 and A15 north to the Humber Bridge, which we glided over before stopping at the toll booths on the north bank. At 4 tonnes I'm pretty sure that we should have paid £4:50 but externally there is no way of telling we are over 3.5 so we got away with paying the £1:50 Class 2 toll.
We bypassed Beverley and continued to Driffield where we picked up the B1249, which I have to say is one of the most wonderfully sinuous roads I've ever driven in this country and I'm sure that my motorcycling friends would absolutely love it. This took us on towards Scarborough where we picked up the A171 through the purple heathered loveliness of the North Yorkshire Moors to Whitby.
We've booked ourselves in at the Whitby Holiday Park which sits high on the clifftops about a mile down the coast from the town itself. We are paying £35 a night for a sloping grass pitch with hook up. I've had to become a lot more money conscious since I retired and that is definitely the maximum I would consider paying to stay on a site for a night, no matter how many bells and whistles it has. I keep harping back to our European trip last year and how the most we paid for a night during our 3 months' away was €25 for a fully serviced pitch near the centre of Lisbon. I just don't get how UK sites can get away with charging such high prices, especially given, as of today, we are now into the off-peak season. If we had arrived yesterday the same pitch would have cost us a whopping £48!
For an additional £3 a night we could have had a "Sea View" pitch and I have to confess that having had a peek at the views they have I do slightly regret not having stumped up the extra few quid in order to have this panorama from my windscreen.
Instead we have an "Abbey View" pitch right next to the elsan point. OK, yes you can see the Abbey ruins in the distance above the adjoining favela of statics but I still think it's stretching the point a little bit.
We are booked in here for 2 nights and we plan to walk down into Whitby tomorrow but for this afternoon we were happy to head down the steep path which leads from the campsite entrance to Saltwick Bay.
The tide appeared to be at its lowest ebb and several people were out on the rocks collecting buckets of winkles. You can see the Holiday Park at the top of the cliffs with the path zigzagging down to the beach to the left.
With temperatures in the mid-20s it was certainly warm enough for a paddle.
We walked from one end of the bay to the other admiring all the different rock formations and even spotting a few fossils along the way.
At the far end of the beach is the transom and engine, which is all that remains of a shipwrecked boat.
We also came across this rock which appeared to be carved with strange hyroglyphics, although I suspect they were in fact naturally created.
Black Nab is a small sea stack which is connected to the mainland at low tide.
We did a quick lap before heading back as the tide was starting to creep back in.
Having slogged our way back up the cliff path we stopped off at the campsite bar for a drink. There we got chatting to an interesting chap called Matt who has spent a large portion of his adult life either homeless or cycling around the country. Matt told us that he works as a handyman/ cleaner at the site during the summer months and during the winter he makes his money from fossil hunting. He disappeared for a while and when he came back he presented us with this apparently non-descript stone.
But when split in half it revealed this fantastic amonite. I tried to give him a few quid for it but he point blank refused, asking that we simply tell the people on reception what a fabulous job he was doing keeping the showers clean.
Tomorrow we'll spend the day in one of our favourite towns before we carry on up the coast towards Northumberland. We've been incredibly lucky with the weather so far on this trip and it's forecast to continue set fair for the foreseeable. After the hit and miss Summer we have had, who would have thought we would be eating salads al-fresco in September on the North Yorkshire Coast!
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