Day 30 - Friday May 19, 2017 - Northumberland

Yesterday, we booked combined online tickets for Alnwick Garden and Alnwick Castle. They’re right next to each other and about 30 minutes drive from the hotel so we’ll leave promptly after breakfast, so as to be there when the Gardens open at 10 am.

Sufficiently replete from breakfast, we left the hotel about 9.30. As we headed in the other direction, we weren’t able to check out the signage that confused us yesterday but perhaps will do so on our return.

We made it in good time to Alnwick. The Gardens and the Castle share the same car park, with the Gardens first and then the Castle and then you can loop back through Alnwick to the car park. It drizzled most of the time we were there but we made it round most of the Gardens. After the obligatory stop for coffee, we walked over to the Castle, where we spent most of our time in the State Apartments; both the Gardens and the Castle are certainly a very worthwhile visit. By the time we were finished in the State Apartments, it was lunchtime, so a stop in the Castle cafe before we looped back through Alnwick to the car.

Although we were returning to the hotel from the opposite direction, we did check out the sign that confused us yesterday and felt largely vindicated. The ‘brown’ information sign with the name of the hotel and the left arrow would clearly seem to point you up the road we took yesterday. The driveway entrance to the hotel and its sign, although they follow quickly thereafter, are largely obscured by a large bush. The hotel signage was only fleetingly visible for a fraction of a second before it disappeared behind the bush and then only if you were looking ahead and not at the left turn you were in the process of making.

We have a 7 pm dinner reservation so will have less time to critique the menu tonight. We expect it to be the same menu but its confusing terminology, punctuation and typos may yet provide some surprises.

Dinner was good. Not that the cooking etc. was better, rather the choices we made seemed to work better.