Barnard Castle (visited Fountains Abbey)

We left York this morning to visit Fountains Abbey on our way north. We also planned on visiting, Durham, Prudhoe Castle and to stop and camp in Jedburgh, Scotland. Our drive to the Fountains Abbey was delayed, as our GPS took us right by it. Sometimes when we create routes it doesn’t actually bring us to the stops, but near them. Well, Julie realized this after we had passed it. Our second attempt to the Fountains Abbey brought us down a very small road, it almost seemed like someone’s driveway. Sure enough, not 5 minutes on the road we were greeted by a herd of cows. Usually animals run in fear of our blue van, but these cows didn’t even budge. Well, I just kept the van moving closer, and closer until finally it was close enough that they decided it was better if they moved. Our second obstacle on this road was a gate. Julie, being a season pro by now (every campsite so far has a gate to open manually) hopped out of the van swung the gate open and made sure it was properly shut behind us. When we finally arrived at Fountains Abbey, I realized just as we parked that the car was starting to seriously overheat, again. Completely dismayed about springing yet another leak, we decided to visit the site before attempting to fix the van again. This also would give it, and ourselves, time to cool down. The old Abbey ruins were absolutely stunning. I could not believe that we could walk amongst them like we did. They are probably the most impressive ruins I have seen on this trip. The gardens we walked through were nice enough, all were extremely manicured, even the large lakes were in order and in patterns. It was extremely worth the visit, it was free for us, but for none EH members, it would have cost £15.80 to get in. When we returned to the van I decided to cut the rubber coolant hose to make a new cleaner piece and reattach it as I did before. The rip occurred in the same section of tube as previously. After fixing it we thought, for a while, that we had more than one leak. Thankfully, we didn’t and we managed to top up the coolant tank and move on. We considered staying at a campground nearby, Boroughbridge, but in the end we decided to keep heading in the direction we needed to, despite the kilometers. However, we cut out the remainder of our stops for the day and stayed in Barnard Castle, near our next stop.