The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
Up the Wall

I have a love/hate relationship with travel days. I love that we're off to a new spot with the promise of new adventures. I hate disrupting my routine-of-the-moment to get all our stuff back into bags. At least we're only moving every three or four days and traveling in a car we can pack sloppy. Moving to a new spot every day by train, bus or plane as some do seems like cruel and unusual punishment ... but perhaps that's just me.

Our destination du jour is Yorkshire and a B&B run by a member of the Affordable Travel Club. ATC is essentially a worldwide group of friends you haven't met yet who offer other members a guest room and basic breakfast for a ridiculously small gratuity. Very few do it commercially, so it ends up being a warm encounter with old friends you didn't know you had.

Some of our most memorable travel experiences have been with ATC hosts in various parts of the world ... and certainly having a local contact in an area gives an inside edge on events and sights that the average tourist would never know about, let alone have access to. That, to us, is what travel is all about ... and what separates the travelers from the tourists. From private dinners with the Marquis in Chateau Brissac to dinner with the locals in the neighborhood pub, ATC gives us a real slice of local life whenever we take advantage of it.

Our GPS took us out of Ambleside on narrow country lanes, many barely more than one car wide and bordered with stone walls. The locals tend to drive fast and it can be startling to suddenly meet someone head-to-head around a blind corner. If you can see them coming, usually one car or the other can pull into a slightly wider spot in the road and let the other pass (sometime with the side mirrors folded back!) Overall, the system seems to work ... and getting off the beaten path took us through some great scenery.

As long a we were close (90 minutes away), Margene wanted to see Hadrian's Wall, a stone barrier stretching 73 miles across the narrowest stretch of northern England, built by the Romans in 122 AD to defend themselves from invaders ... or as a show of strength ... or just to give the 20,000 soldiers manning the wall (and its 80 forts) something to do. Nobody is really sure, but appparently while the Romans ruled Britain for 400 years, they never quite ruled its people.

Our hostess for the next two nights in the tiny village of Millington is Maureen Dykes. Maureen has two rooms that she offers as B&B, mostly to hikers and mostly in the summer. We happened to catch her at a quiet time and got the ATC rate ... and a marvelous home-cooked meal! We'll take her to dinner at the local pub tomorrow night to balance the scales.

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