The hourlong drive to Stoke went great, let's go on a real trek! Number One on my list of annoying-to-get-to places I wanted to see was Castle Howard, filming location of the 1981 Brideshead Revisited miniseries and now site of pilgrimage for Masterpiece-Theatre-heads.

Howards are still living in this house. It's quite an operation. Besides the house there are many gardens, an "adventure playground" (too rainy, luckily we were able to conceal its existence), a garden center, a shop selling fancy produce and groceries, and at least four restaurants.

If anything, seeing the house seemed like a little bit of an afterthought which I guess makes sense when you consider that people have to live there and go about their business. The parts you can visit probably comprise about 30% of the structure.

You can see the above hall, a few reception rooms, an exhibit about a fire that destroyed part of the house in the forties, a bedroom and dressing room.

A wall of china that might have seemed more impressive if we had not seen china Mecca the previous day. The room where they keep the Reynolds, an artist who I have only ever heard about in the context of distressed aristocrats selling heirlooms to pay the inheritance tax. I told a volunteer docent that, and she pointed to the painting and said the Howards had sold it to the Tate to pay the inheritance tax. The Tate decided not to display it, so the painting stays here unless they change their minds.

Between two meals, the house, the children whooping through the garden pretending the hedges were "portals," and a visit to the garden center for Granny (karmic payback for the time my kids have spent trailing behind me at fiber festivals), we were there for about 4 hours and easily could have stayed for double thathad the weather been less bleak and I less nervous about driving home. My Brideshead Revisited dreams are now fulfilled, even though the very fact of being able to visit it at all makes that world seem even more distant.

Time to drive home. Traffic had picked up and with Daylight Savings arriving a week early here it was dark at about 4:30. Then the fog rolled in. For fifteen miles or so we crawled along a back road, everything further than a car width from the side of the road completely hidden. We were probably passing farms or moors but it looked uncannily like a sheer drop on either side. Folk horror took on new resonance. My lack of a UK number* meant that I couldn't order pizza for dinner online but I could still call and order it from a human. What a time to be alive. Granny Froggered across a busy road in the rain to retrieve it. I could have laid down and kissed the driveway (where we could not actually park) on our return.

*I caved this week because it is almost impossible to interact with the NHS without one. But the 919 number still works!