Bobba Adventures Pt. 1

This is my Bobba (holding a traditional bobba):


She lives in Harrogate, which is about an hour away from Reeth. The Aldersons drove me down to see her on Wednesday, and I'm staying with her for a week. She's from Northern Ireland, and she's Jewish (according to her, she's got a lot of chutzpah), and she is shorter than me:

The first night I was here, she asked me to help her reach something on a shelf. I...helped someone else...get something off a high shelf. And she keeps hugging me and telling me how much she loves me. I could get used to this. This is Bobba's car, which I love because it is soooo tinyyyy.

So yeah, that's my Bobba. My first afternoon here, we went to Valley Gardens, which is a public park in Harrogate. It was a little cloudy, but all the flowers were still in full bloom (I think I have about 20 pictures of flowers so far).

We had an ice cream (with a flake!) at Valley Gardens and then headed back to Bobba's flat (when I was younger I called it her "pancake" because I was soooo clever) and had dinner. We watched Midsomer Murders, an English murder mystery series, and then got ready for bed. I liked seeing some of the older pictures Bobba has up in her living room. Here are my parents on their wedding day:

And my Bobba, uncle, mom, cousins, sister, and me at my cousins' house back when I was maybe 5 or 6. Spot (my dalmation) is still white here. Cray-cray!

We woke up early on Thursday (8:30...too much) so we could go to Knaresborough, a neighboring town. It has the ruins of a castle, a cute little main street, plus an awesome view of the train viaduct over the river:

We went to the castle museum and learned things about things, then headed back. My cousins took me out to dinner (more on that in the next post) and by the time I got back, it was almost time for bed. The next day, we headed to Tropical World (another location from my childhood) which is essentially a giant terrarium where they have butterflies and some cool animals. I took about a million pictures, so I'll save them all for facebook, except for my favorite. Check out this meerkat reigning over his meerkat kingdom:

My Bobba tried to take a picture of me with the meerkats, but accidentally just got a picture of a meerkat nose. I am holding daily digital camera/laptop tutorials for her, so maybe next time.

The biggest reason that it's so awesome to see my Bobba is that I haven't seen her in 6 years, since the last time she came to visit us at home. It got complicated for her to come over or for all of us to go over, so it's nice to be able to go on my own and hang out with her by myself. We've been getting to know each other again, and drinking tea. A LOT of tea. Definitely the most tea I've ever had within one week of my life. But luckily I won't have to deal with tea withdrawals when I go home...because she gave me a tea pot. Pinkies up.