Outdoor Shortcuts

The Spouse and I went to a new gym on Sunday morning to try it out.  We haven't decided whether to join or not - I hate that one has to commit for 18 months to get a remotely reasonable rate.  I sincerely wish gyms had seasonal memberships because we don't really need a gym in the summer.  When it's nice out, we bike, hike, jog, rollerblade, garden and canoe.  For more upper body workout we just stand still in the back yard and swat mosquitoes.

I know myself - no matter how much I'm paying a gym I'm not going to be inclined to exercise indoors in the summer when I can be outdoors instead.  In the winter, though, we turn into pathetic lumps.  Every stinking winter.  Oh, sure, we still get out for a few hours of walking or snowshoeing each weekend, but that's hardly enough to keep us in shape.

This year I've had enough of our lazy winter lumpishness.  Adirondack High Peak season is just around the corner, and I'd prefer not to collapse in a gasping heap 1/2 way up the next mountain.  So, I dragged our sorry butts to a nice gym that's not too far from home to try it out.

Incidentally, we have to decide by Thursday if we're going to join in order to get the best rate and a whole bunch of free stuff, like t-shirts, gym bags, two sessions with a trainer, a free hour on the tennis courts, and some other odds and ends.  I like free stuff, whether it's really free or not.  I'm appalled that I feel compelled to join within the next 5 days to get the "free" stuff, just as they intend.  I like to think of myself as being resistant to peer pressure and advertising since I don't have a TV, don't listen to the radio other than NPR, and seldom read magazines and therefore hardly ever see or hear ads.

Clearly I'm just deluding myself.  I'm completely susceptible.  I'll keep you posted on just how fabulous the free t-shirts and gym bags are.

The purpose of this little aside is to explain why our Sunday walk wasn't really a walk so much as a series of little stops in the car, and very short forays into the cold.  By the time I got done running 2 miles and using a whole bunch of nautilus equipment at the gym, my legs and arms felt like cooked spaghetti.  I then went home and ate a massive lunch, thereby undoing most of the work I'd done burning calories at the gym.  I then did NOT feel like being cold.  I always seem to reach that point in February - I'm so sick of winter I can hardly stand it.

After my post a couple of weeks ago about the ruins we'd stumbled upon along the Erie Canal, my father mentioned some ruins he had found along the Cayuga County Trail that runs from Cato to Fair Haven.  He also mentioned that they were right where a road crosses the trail.  So, for our weekend outdoors adventure, Spouse and I decided to go on a quest to find the ruins.

We started off in the Village of Cato, where we actually started walking down the trail a little way.  We found some friends:

And evidence that they spend a lot of time in this little stream.

We also found a few scenic spots.

I love this donut of snow around the base of this tree.

And the incredibly striking color of red berries against snow.

Between the spaghetti legs, the headwind, and the numerous stinky snowmobiles, we did not get far down the trail before we wound up back at the car and went seeking the next spot where the road crosses the trail.

We drove for a while and stopped along the road to shoot pics of some corn against a brightening evening sky.

We made our way over back roads up to Route 104, where we stopped and got out because there was a cool bridge over what I think is Sterling Creek.  Just as we got onto the bridge, the sun appeared, lighting up the trees in the distance.

My arms still feel like spaghetti and holding them up to this keyboard is getting increasingly difficult, so I'm going to make y'all wait for tomorrow to find out if we ever did manage to find the ruins...

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Simon Outtakes

If there is one thing Basset hounds are good for, it's amusing photos. Having a good camera just hanging about means there will be infinite opportunities for catching the hounds in some kind of funny, wrinkly, droopy pose, and with the new lens we've been snapping lots of experimental shots.

Here are a few we took of Simon in the last week that amused me - just thought I'd share.

Wrinkles slide forward.  He must have extra strong eyelid muscles to be able to hold up all those wrinkles while looking down:

No idea why his tongue is sticking that far out of his head at this moment:

Check out the lip flapping in the breeze, and all the snaggly little teeth:

Schnozz:

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The York Minster and the Treasurer's House

My other good ghost story from York is as follows.

The York Minster dominates the city of York.  It is the largest gothic cathedral in northern Europe.  It's like a living thing, cropping up over and over again as one turns corners throughout the city.

The history of the York minster, in brief, is as follows.  The first York Minster was built for the Anglo Saxon King, Edwin of Northumbria.  He had been baptized in a small wooden church in 627, and ordered a stone church built to replace it.  That church was built and survived the Viking era of York, but was damaged by fire in the Norman conquest of York in 1069.  It is unknown where that church lay.

Incidentally, the title "Minster" is given to churches that were established in the Anglo Saxon period as missionary teaching churches.
 

On the roof of the York Minster

The Normans ordered a new Minster to be constructed in a separate location, and that is the location of the present Minster.  Construction was begun around 1080, and completed around 1100.  Bits of that version of the Minster are still visible in the undercroft.  The present Minster was constructed in stages, between about 1215 (starting with the north and south transepts) and 1472 (ending with the western towers).

The Five Sisters Windows

Next to the Minster, across a narrow cobblestone street, lies a building known as the Treasurer's House.  In medieval times, it served as the home for the treasurers of the Minster, which was a prestigious and coveted position.  In 1547 it passed into private hands when the office of treasurer was abolished as a result of the Reformation, and the house remained under private ownership until it was donated to the National Trust in 1930.  It's a magnificent house, although it has undergone so many renovations it is difficult to know what it may have looked like at any given time in history.  Sadly, I don't seem to have taken any photos of it.

The ghost story I heard on the ghost walks of York is as follows.  In 1953, a young plumber by the name of Harry Martindale was doing some work in the basement of the Treasurer's House.  He heard the sound of a horn or bugle in the distance, although thought little of it as he assumed it was the sound of kids playing in the street outside.  Suddenly the horn sounded very close to him.  He scrambled into a corner of the basement, from which vantage point he observed a bunch of tired and dirty Roman soldiers walk through the basement wall, through the room, and out through the wall on the other side of the basement.  He could only see the soldiers from about the knees up - it appeared to him almost as though they were walking through the basement on their knees.

After the incident, Mr. Martindale fled from the basement and told his tale.  Initially, historians were skeptical about his story because the description Mr. Martindale provided of the soldiers did not match what was known about the Roman soldiers at that time.  He described unusual kilts, helmets and other armaments, the likes of which Roman soldiers had never been known to wear. 

Fastforward to the late 1960s.  When the central tower of the York Minster began to collapse, a massive collaboration among historians, archaeologists, architects and engineers was launched to save the structure.  Before they could inject massive concrete supports into the basement to support the tower, excavations were done.  Elements of the Norman predecessor to the Minster were uncovered.  Additionally, archaeologists unearthed a Roman road that extended under the Minster in the direction of the Treasurer's House. 

Further excavation in the basement of the Treasurer's House revealed that the Roman road did indeed run under the basement, approximately 15 inches below the present floor.  The Roman soldiers Mr. Martindale saw had been walking on their own road, and that was why they could only be seen from the knees up.

Additionally, other artifacts were discovered in the Minster excavations that corroborated Mr. Martindale's descriptions of the soldiers' armor.  Other archaeological discoveries had also been made between 1953 and the late 1960s, that confirmed that indeed, Roman soldiers could have worn the clothing and armor Mr. Martindale had described.

This is probably one of the best documented ghost stories in York.  I have to admit, it's a convincing tale, since Mr. Martindale had talked with historians in detail about his observations long before the excavations under the Minster began.  Mr. Martindale was not a historian, and could not possibly have known about the presence of the Roman road, nor that Roman soldiers had ever worn such attire, as no one knew those details until many years later.

I heard many other ghost stories in York, but those are the two I remember best.  Remembering all this about York makes me want to take another trip to England!

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Hauntings

I promised ghost stories, so I shall deliver. Honestly, I'm running out of good things to blog about this time of year. I could use a good dose of spring. Absent that, I can at least tell some ghost stories for sitting around the fire of an evening. After all, I love to tell stories. I guess that is part of the reason I started this blog in the first place.

I mentioned last week that I spent some time living in York, England when I was in high school. York is a spectacular old walled city, with incredibly old buildings, the largest gothic cathedral in northern Europe, and wonderful atmosphere. One of the things I loved most about York was the sense of history just radiating off those cobblestone streets.

On the walls of the city:

Check out this ancient church and its wonky floors. I stumbled upon this one afternoon, tucked into a courtyard surrounded by buildings.

There are dozens upon dozens of tiny passageways and alleys around the city, referred to as "snickelways". While not the most romantic and medieval of all the snickelways, this snickelway was actually in the house I lived in, and led to the walled garden behind the house.

With a city that old, one is bound to have some sordid bits of history, like Clifford's Tower.

What a sad story - I cannot even comprehend having to make the kind of decision those 150 people had to make on that March night in 1190.

With history, especially gruesome history like Clifford's tower, tend to come ghost stories. York was named by the Ghost Research Foundation International to be the most haunted city in the world, with 504 recorded hauntings. For 17-year-old me, that amounted to some great history lessons, and a whole lot of fun, too.

There are a number of different ghost tours in York, and they compete fiercely with each other for business. I went on several in my time there because I got such a kick out of them.  It was fascinating to compare the different versions of the same story told by the different tour guides.  Some of those tour guides were talented actors.

Anyway, you can imagine my surprise when, on my first ghost tour, the tour stopped at...

My host family's house.  Yikes!

The house was supposedly named "The Plague House" in some old city records. In an ancient city like York, the bubonic, pneumonic, and/or septicemic plague made its rounds through the city more than once, often decimating the population. During outbreaks, city officials would mark an "X" on the door of any house in which someone was infected with the plague, warning people to stay away from the house. Eventually, officials would then enter the houses to remove the bodies.

I heard two different stories about the house at 5 Minster Yard. In one version of the story, during one of the plague outbreaks, a young girl living in the house contracted the plague. Her parents panicked and abandoned her, leaving her to die alone in the house.

In the other version of the story, the whole rest of the family contracted the plague - everyone except the young girl. Because of the X on the door, no one would approach the house, despite the girl's desperate cries for help from the window. In that version of the story she died of starvation.

When the officials later came to clear out the bodies, they found her lifeless body.  Presumably just for dramatic effect, the story tellers would often suggest that the girl had slipped into an opening in the wall while she was crying out the window for assistance, and that when the officials came to collect her body they merely left her there and bricked her body in. That bit of the story I never did understand - why on earth would they leave her? I admit, though, that it kind of wigged me out that if you measured all the rooms on the second story of the house, it did seem that there was some space in the middle that you couldn't access. A hidden room, long ago bricked up? Probably nothing so exciting, but one does wonder.

Surely the question you all want to know the answer to is, was the house really haunted? I never saw anything suspicious during my brief time there, and at least at that time my host family hadn't, either. However, the people who had lived in the house before my host family had allegedly seen a young girl's ghost crying in the spare bedroom.

Whether because of that rumor or perhaps just because they wanted to keep the spare room free in case they had other guests while I was there, my host family renovated a room in the attic for me rather than putting me in the spare room. Although I have a wicked sense of curiosity about such things, I think I'm glad I didn't have to sleep there. I would have worked myself up to a major case of the willies every night.

The only curious thing that I experienced wasn't until I got back home and developed my pictures. Near the end of my stay, I took some photos of the inside of the house. One turned out very strange. There were no reflective surfaces in the room other than the window you see in the photo, which had curtains hanging in front of it. This doesn't look like anything in particular to me - I certainly don't see the shape of a ghostly, night gowned, plague-ridden child in it - but it is interesting. I still wonder what caused the weird effects.

The window that the ghost tour guides would stop and point at was a tiny little window, not the one in the photo above.  You can hardly see the ghost tour window in this photo:

If you look at the little stone house on the end of the row, you can see one large bay window on the end, and just to the right of that is a much smaller window. I'm certain the tour guides point to that window for effect because it is a charming little window. Inside the house, that window merely led to a hallway, not a room:

The girl I exchanged with and I had tremendous fun scaring people on the ghost tour.  We would hide in that hallway and wait until the tour guide got to the most suspenseful bit of the story. Then I would silently press my hand against the glass of the window, and we'd collapse into hysterical laughter at the screams of all the poor souls on the tour. Even the tour guide was a bit taken aback the first time we did it.

I still chuckle to remember it.

The next installment of the ghost chronicles:  The York Minster and the Treasurer's House.

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