Scarborough

After leaving Wharram Percy we headed for Scarborough but decided we should meet our friends Julie and Richard in Malton for lunch. They were traveling home after a weekend on the Yorkshire coast. Miriam had found something which said Malton was the foodie capital of Yorkshire. What a joke. Apart from being closed (it was Sunday after all) the scones we had in the cafe we chose were inedible. I asked Miriam whether they were badly made or stale - her reply: both. We wondered why the cafe girl asked us if we had enough butter, perhaps the scones were meant to be dry and crumbly!

After that experience, and since J&R were still about 45 minutes drive away, we decided to carry on to Pickering. Amazingly, almost exactly when we saw a nice pub on the side of the road advertising the best Yorkshire Pudding in Yorkshire, J&R arrived from the other direction! A good omen, so we stopped and had a slap up roast from the carvery with all the trimmings. And it was good food.

After lunch we headed into Scarborough. We new this would be a typical English seaside resort with all the usual tat. But OMG, we could not believe our eyes when we turned onto the front. Even though it was late on Sunday afternoon, there were still hundreds of people everywhere and cars and motorbikes clogging the main drag. We had been warned by the Airbnb host that parking would be a problem but this was ridiculous. Luckily, we did manage to get a park in the long-term park behind our accommodation but had to carry our luggage around to get in the front door.

Our host Sarah quickly showed us our room and left us to it. She is off to the Canary Islands in the morning so we were just given the key and left to our own devices. We have no problem with that and the place is exactly as described. A listed Georgian building right on the waterfront (built in 1670) and we have a view out over the marina. In the photo, our building is the brick one to the right of the Tudor-style pub (the Golden Orb) and our window is the top right of the six nearest the pub.

We walked around a bit being horrified at the garish penny arcades and ice-cream parlours. Everyone seemed to be eating fish-n-chips or ice-creams. It is a nice place with a magnificent castle ruin above the town but way over-the-top for our tastes. We ended up have the obligatory scampi-and-chips in a cafe straight out of the 1950s and getting an early night. We'll have another look around tomorrow morning before heading off to Mike and Barbara's for the next week.