Monday 1 August - Skipton

Where was Bertie? He spent the night in the motorhome parking area of Coach Street Car Park in Skipton. It costs £5.50 for a 24-hour ticket, but as far as we could make out (poor signage) when parked in a motorhome bay*, there's also a £5 for the 'no charges apply' period of 8pm to 9am. So, we paid £10.50.

Weather: Some sunshine. Some rain. Warm.

Unsurprisingly, we didn't rush to get up and away on Monday morning, so it was gone noon by the time we arrived in Skipton - a town we remember having walked through on a backpacking trip in 2010, but not with any great recollection of the place.

Bertie made like Goldilocks on arrival. With all of the motorhome spaces taken and with limited overhang behind any of the below-average-length car spaces, he first tried a space on one side of the car park, which required him to nestle into a tree. He then tried a car space in between two motorhome spaces, and there he would have stayed, if it hadn't been for the adjacent motorhome leaving a few minutes later, with Bertie in pole position to shuffle over, beating a van that made a similar dash from across the car park. 

With the motorhome spaces being so big, we pulled Bertie right to the front and I went and apologised to the competing van for having won the race, and offered to share the spot. They declined, but just as we were going out another van was struggling to choose where to park, so we also offered them the other half of our space. We later came to regret this...

Bertie was in the car park on the right

A slow walk around the town was had, including lunch*, an ice cream for Mick and a cake purchase for later:

My verdict: I like the town. It's got a good array of old-fashioned shops that you don't see so often these days (a proper ironmonger; a sweetshop lined with big containers of sweets, just like in my late father's newsagents shop; a fabric shop; even the cake shop looked like it was straight out of the 1980s). 

Even if the entrance fee had been lower, Mick wasn't in the market for extensive sightseeing. 

Our regret on our offer to share our parking space started at around 10pm. We have no idea what our neighbours were doing to make it sound like they were constantly moving heavy furniture, but at 11.30pm I was sorely tempted to knock on their door to tell them that in 11 years of motorhoming, spending up to 8 months a year on the road, we have never had such a disturbance from an adjacent motorhome. (I did have a similar experience in Linn of Dee some years ago when, in the huge car park, at around 11pm a motorhome pulled in behind me and made a similar type of noise, but on that occasion just for half an hour, not for two hours solid.)

(*What if a motorhome is parked in a non-motorhome bay? The signage says this is permissible, provided that if using more than one bay, then one ticket must be purchased per bay. Nothing said one can't overnight in a non-motorhome bay, but I can only assume this was either the intention or what is stated in the Traffic Regulation Order even if not on the signage.

**The toilets in the pub involved two flights of stairs. Mick's quads didn't appreciate the descent.)