Travelling with young children is certainly a different experience to our previous trips to Europe. Our recent visit to Durham on the way to Hull is a good case in point. Durham is well known for its impressive cathedral and we were eager to take a look. The drive from Glasgow to Hull meant the boys were in the car for hours and we were aware that it would be unfair on them to then expect them to maintain silent calm as they walked about a "big old building". We purchased a book from Amazon before we left Aus called 1001 Day Trips in the UK with Children which listed a child-friendly facility called Diggerland on the outskirts of Durham. The plan was to give the children a good break before heading off to the cathedral. We arrived at Diggerland at about 3:30pm and were stunned by a huge collection of full sized excavators for children to operate - a little boy's idea of heaven! We raged about digging up dirt, knocking things down, spinning, driving, bumping for an hour or so and then bundled the children back in the car to head off to the cathedral.
We drove into Durham. We could see the cathedral up on the hill and followed the signs, only to end up in a cathedral parking area from which we needed to take a bus. We tried again, driving around, following our noses, trying to get closer to the grand spire we could see....all roads closed and we ended up going in circles. Durham cathedral takes several hours to visit, not least because the parking and bus rides to get to the building itself are a very time consuming activity. By 5:30pm we were aware we still had some distance to travel into a city we didn't know to accommodation we had a tentative phone booking for (no deosit paid) and felt we must push on.
So we left Durham a little frustrated that we had come so close to visiting a truly significant structure, but had missed it. Oh, well. We hadn't been left entirely without a source of cultural enrichment - after all, we had been to Diggerland!
