York

While planning my trip to Northern England, I asked an English friend what places would be worth a visit. York was one of his top recommendations so I naturally decided to make a stop. After spending 3 underwhelming days in Newcastle, I was happy to find that York had all the charm and numerous sites that Newcastle was severely lacking.

But admittedly, I really didn’t even know the city existed beforehand. I suppose the name New York City (and state for that matter) had to originate from somewhere, but I hadn’t ever given it a thought. And being that the US was settled largely by the English, it would make sense that an “Old York” exists somewhere in England. Though after some research, I found out that New York City wasn’t necessarily named after the city of York, per se. It was originally a Dutch colony named New Amsterdam, then later became English and was named New York after the Duke of York, who was the brother of King Charles II – not specifically the city itself.

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While we’re currently living in Spain, we plan to take advantage of the exceptional position of our new base by taking frequent side trips throughout the year. However, we do want to keep it lower key than last year when we hopped around from country to country barely taking to time to really dive deep into most of them. We’ve already shared the many things we plan to do in Spain and the travels we have in mind for France. Really there is only one more European country that we want to take things a littler further with this year: England. Because we’re trying to be more focused in our travels, we’ve decided to stick to northern England specifically.

As we began brainstorming destinations in the north, our list seemed to fill up quickly with the many English destinations we’ve always wanted to see. <— That’s the sentence I wish I could write. What I must truthfully write is –> We’ve already seen all of England because we were in London last summer. Why bother to go again?

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