Your own backyard
Cliché it may be but it’s true when they say you don’t always appreciate what’s in your own back yard.
Last weekend we got in the car and headed out into the country. Having lived in the same city in England for around 40 years, there aren’t too many new destinations to select from a map so we simply decided to head north and try to follow roads we’d never driven before.
So that was our Sunday, driving the B6451 north from Otley, past Lindley Wood Reservoir (a place I didn’t even know existed this time last week) and along the perimeter fences of Menwith Hill (a US National Security Agency installation, said to be the world’s largest monitoring communications station).
Fountains Abbey
At Glasshouses we turned right on the B6265 and headed east to nearby Fountains Abbey, a 12th-century Cistercian Abbey which I must have been to half a dozen times or more, but never before from this direction.
The abbey view from over the River Skell
This is a place I always associate with childhood picnics, games of hide-and-seek among the ruins and my sister getting bitten by a rat but today was the first time I’d seen it with a covering of snow (and also the first time I’d appreciated that it’s actually a World Heritage Site).
I know the detail is of little relevance to predominantly American readership (and even non-American readers are looking for tips on travelling Route 66, not the B6451) but the lesson is transferable wherever you are: you don’t always have to be visiting somewhere new to experience something new.