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Saturday 6/30

Drove to Durham Cathedral, called the greatest Norman building in England, where Joseph Barber Lightfoot served as bishop 1878-1888 and was buried.  Climbed the 325 stairs with Terry Parsons and met Mark, Mike, Daniel, Catherine, and Diana Colvin for picture taking and great views of the city and surrounding hills.  However, the town was less than impressive compared to York.

During lunch at the market Chris and I arranged to join Coach 2 for a stop at Hadrian’s wall, since our coach planned to stay in town and skip the wall.  As mentioned by Robin, the wall in that area is only about three foot high, having been largely dismantled to build houses, but we enjoyed seeing it because of its history.  Originally the wall was 15’ high with 6’ palisades, extending 80 miles across England.

On the way to Edinburgh we stopped at a wool shop in Jedbrough. We drove into Edinburgh for dinner. Tom Martin asked for fruit for desert instead of cake and got canned fruit cocktail with some fresh berries.  He ate the berries and gave the fruit cocktail to Jack Orr because Jack had complained vociferously about receiving fruit cocktail in Italy four years ago.  Jack got a big kick out of this and admitted that maybe he had complained a lot.

Then we drove to the Quality Hotel Edinburgh Airport, where a mile long line of young people were waiting in the rain for a nearby rock concert. Some of the young people were dressed in costumes. There were pirates, cowboys, a Wookie and cross-dressers. Some just added neon fake fur legwarmers to short shorts and tube tops. We had passed a few people dressed that way back in Edinburgh, perhaps on their way here. The concert was "Tiesto Elements of Life" - a dj and dance show.

Several people feared they would be kept awake all night, so the Orrs were able to get an inside room.  Turned out not to be a problem.  What did appear to be a problem was that on Friday, two cars packed with explosives were found parked on London streets and this day an explosive laden SUV rammed into the Glasgow airport.  Police quickly caught several suspects who turned out to be Muslim physicians, but the airport entrances had long lines of cars.