Askham, Cumbria: Day 6

Coffee shop

Well, the good weather was too good to last and today we had drizzle.   Just enough to wet the garden, but not enough to stop us going out for the day.   We collected Joe's paper and drove to Carlisle and found parking for the day.  We ambled in the direction of the centre on the lookout for coffee.   We spurned Costas in favour of something more individual and spotted an old fashioned coffee and tea emporium with tables.   It was a delightfully old fashioned place with a long list of different types of coffee served in cafetieres.   We chose a medium roast Colombian.  It was a little weak, but had a good flavour and it washed down a fruit scone (half each) very nicely.   I ventured downstairs to the loo and passed through storage and what looked like a museum below stairs.

Tullie Museum

Refreshed we went to the tourist office and got a street map and then made for the Tullie Museum.  We had been here before but it seemed to have had a make-over.   We started in the old house and saw an exhibition of items from the collection mixed with Japanese prints.  Then upstairs to an exhibition about pre-Raphaelites and into the main part of the museum.   Peter and I lost each other and were finally re-united with the aid of Peter's phone which, amazingly, he had with him.   We had lunch in the elegant museum cafe and then returned to see a film of Carlisle life and rounded off the visit with the exhibition of automata.  They were delightful and funny.  Cleverly the models were interspersed with examples of mechanisms (ratchets, gears, levers, cams etc.) that you could operate.  We had great fun making everything work.

Back at the house we did some packing and sorting as we leave in the morning.  Then we walked down through the village to the Punchbowl Inn, which Joe and Helen had told us wasn't very good in comparison with the Queen's Head.   However, the Punchbowl did hot food in the evening so we chanced it.  The waitress was extremely good and friendly and the food was good pub food.   Peter had fish and chips and I had sausage and mash which was well done.   We had a taster trio of three beers served in small glasses on a wooden holder which we hadn't seen done before.   The pub was hopping with a weird wedding party from Scotland.   Half the men wore kilts and the other half identical suits and the ladies wore an assortment of close fitting garments!   We asked the waitress if the bride had already left and were told that she and the groom broke up between the church and the reception and had gone their separate ways!!!!   Apparently they had both come from New Zealand to get married (and the waitress said the wedding had cost £12,000) and we could only speculate at the story behind this.   A coach finally came and took some of the guests away, but not before an argument had broken out in the bar between a regular and a tipsy Scot over the swearing that was going on.   I thought this was a bit unfair as, although they were downing vast numbers of pints and going in and out to the loo, they were quite quiet and kept themselves to themselves.   Who knows what had been going on!   Anyway, it made for a different and amusing end to our Askham holiday.