We woke up about 11 on Tuesday morning and had some breakfast. I forget what. Nothing exciting though.

Once we were fully conscious, we went for a walk along the breakwater and watched the waves for a good long while. Then we walked back past the cottage and over the foot bridge into the village, while watching a family of ducks: well, I say family but think it was a girl duck chasing two boy ducks because she wanted to be their faghag or something (the boy ducks weren’t having any of it). We walked around down to the little beach first then around the village but had missed the morning-only butchers and post office: made mental notes to go again in the morning sometime.

Since we were dressed and out of the house already, we decided to go to Whitby for lunch. It’s a lovely drive between Whitby and Staithes, right along the interesting coast, and when we got to Whitby, we parked by the harbour and walked down to the pier. We saw Wally from ‘Where’s Wally?’ who seems to have retired to Whitby with two black labradors, one of whom was carrying a tennis racket in his mouth (so cute), and we also saw lots of seagulls standing on cars and posts declaring themselves to be king of the seagulls or something. We watched them for a little while (seagulls, not Wally and dogs) then got fish and chips from the apparently infamous Magpie Cafe. We sat on the pier to eat them watching the various doggies (including Wally’s) playing on the beach. After we’d eaten, we went down to the beach ourselves to collect pebbles and found some small, not very interesting fossils (but since they were our first fossil finds, we were delighted).

Once we were done down there, we bought supplies (fudge and treacle toffee) from the town then went back to Staithes via Hinderwell for coal and wood.

We got the fire going as soon as we got back to the house and snuggled in for the night. Still full from the fish and chips, we just had bread and cheese for tea. For the rest of the evening, we read, drew and watched ‘Almost Famous’ - but bizarrely the video player on the laptop didn’t include any of the non-digegetic music for the second cd which we interpreted as a bold decision by the director to not use any background music in a film about a band. Yeah…

We read til far too late and didn’t get to sleep until after 2.