hills

Whernside and Ingleborough, are two of the "three peaks" of North Yorkshire. They aren't really peaks at all, but that makes the area all the better for mountain biking. Today we finally got our act together sufficiently to view the third peak, Pen-y-ghent.

This view was thanks to The Return Of El Conquistador, the mountain tandem. James now thinks he wants to live in Settleswick (Settle or Giggleswick), which is a place that is close to a lot of this mountain biking. Apart from the colour of the sky, the surrounding landscape is surprisingly Wyoming like, with tufty grass, cliffy hills, and pronghorn antelope sheep everywhere.

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Wot no camelia?

Culture shock continues unabated. "Normally" at this time of year the grass is brown and the hedgerows full of common-or-garden pink camelia. Instead zillions of white snowdrops are poking through the luminous green grass. The snowdrop previously featured in this blog in November(!) 2009, when we found a small patch of them in Jomyoji English garden. I wonder in which months the camellia will flower here in ole blighty.

We also "normally" have about 6 weeks of almost no rain at this time of year. I'm not sure, but this year so far there may have been about one day when it did not rain. That isn't to say it rains all the time, and indeed the rain is much lighter than Japanese rain. For example, we've done quite a lot of running and cycling have only got properly wet while running once and not at all while cycling.

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