Blogtober 2022 : Day 19

I went to see my friend Lucy yesterday.  It’s just over an hour’s drive for me from Winwick up to Skipton where she lives but yesterday, for the first time in all the years I’ve been driving up to see her, it took hours.  Two hours and a half hours, in fact, and a fair amount of that time was spent sitting in a queue on the motorway when it got shut after an accident and everyone had to wait behind a traffic officer patrol car whilst an HGV tow truck manoeuvred a lorry across the carriageway and then towed it away.

I don’t know what was going on with the traffic yesterday – prior to that there had been another accident and a car was left stranded in the middle of the motorway, all smashed up with the driver still inside.  It must have been very scary for them and I hope that someone got to them quickly to help.  I phoned the emergency services to report it (hands-free, of course) – I think it’s always easy to assume that someone else has done that but seeing the driver still in the car as I drove past really upset me and whether I was the first or the thirty-first person to phone, I just wanted someone to help them.

October seems to have been the month for heavy traffic and accidents when I’ve been out and about and I am grateful that I am still in one piece to tell you about them!  It’s funny, I would never normally mention them but writing Blogtober posts seems to mean that you get all the smaller details of my days as well as the bigger stuff!

When I finally got up to Skipton and met up with Lucy, we left the town and headed a few miles further up the road to Bolton Abbey.  We’ve been here a few times before and Lucy also talks about it a lot on her blog as she walks here quite often with her family; it’s a lovely place to visit.  (There are lots of photos in this post including The Strid, a natural water feature which gives me the creeps every time I see it! 🙂 )

Oh, what a joy it was to be safely out of the car and looking across the river at that beautiful sky!

This was supposed to be an arty photo of my cup of hot chocolate with the Bolton Abbey cafe in the background, but a combination of not having my specs on to see where I was focussing and being a bit twitchy because I was in need of some sugar sustenance has resulted in this photo instead.

Ah well, you’ve got a good view of the cafe and the bridge!

We had planned to come to Bolton Abbey because there’s an exhibition on at the moment in the Priory Church featuring the moon, and after finishing our drinks, we set off along the path on a circular route that took us along the side of the river and would loop back past the church.

Oh, that sky!  Autumn days like this are just perfect, you want to bottle them up and keep them for the drab days of Winter that are part and parcel of that season.

I’ll write more about our walk tomorrow, but let me just show you these hills …

We watched the shadows move across them as the clouds broke up the sunshine and they looked amazing.

But now, are you ready to see the moon?

The exhibition is Museum of the Moon by artist Luke Jerram – you may have seen Gaia, a giant representation of the earth, which was one of his earlier installations – and it is currently touring with a stay at Bolton Abbey until 31 October 2022.

The moon is seven metres across, suspended from the wooden ceiling, and features detailed NASA imagery; each centimetre of the moon represents 5km of the moon’s surface.  I did wonder before we saw it whether I’d just be thinking we’d walked into a real life version of the film Despicable Me where the main character tries to shrink the moon to steal it, but actually, once we were there, I didn’t think about that at all.

It’s beautiful, and the soundtrack that was playing was lovely.

I’ve darkened this last photo a little so that you can see the stained glass reflections which were just stunning.

Surprisingly to me, the moon was smooth with the surface printed on like a picture on a large balloon, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that from the photographs, and at night the moon is lit from within and I can imagine that makes it look far more “lifelike” if you could call the moon that.

I was glad we went.

And then it was time for this pair to go and seek out some lunch.  Come for a walk around the Bolton Abbey estate with us tomorrow!