There are three problems (probably more, but I’ve identified these) with trying to blog on the road….

(a) Finding an internet connection. This is a major problem. For the first few days of my journey I was at a retreat house on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. Internet connectivity was simply non-existent. Now at a B&B in Whitby, it is inconsistent. I tried setting up to enter a couple of posts when I arrived last evening, but the router kept cutting in and out. It seems more steady this morning, but who knows.

(b) This B&B underscores the second problem. Space in which to work. I have a room about the size of a reasonable walk-in closet in an American suburban home, maybe 7 feet by 11 feet. Into this tiny room are crammed a double bed, two night stands, a straight-back chair, and a shower stall! What was obviously the closet has been converted into a loo and there simply is no closet for luggage or clothing. I’m currently sitting on the chair hunched over the bed on which my laptop rests and bounces about a bit as I type.

(c) And the most telling problem – Time. There is so much I want to see and do that doing it and seeing it all leaves little time to write about it in the same day. I’ve started notes on Hadrian’s Wall, Bede’s abbey at Jarrow, the Angel of the North, getting lost in Newcastle (£2.40 in unnecessary tunnel tolls as a result), and so forth – but finding the time to get them into shape for blog publication is, well, turning out to be almost impossible.

And then there’s the matter of Flickr’s restriction on uploads of photographs – I seem to be taking too many.

So, dear reader (as Miss Manners was wont to address her audience), bear with me. I’ll get back to the blog with descriptions and pictures soon. Today, however, I’m going to tramp around Whitby Abbey and then head back to the north to visit Durham Cathedral, which I decided had to wait after the emotional exhaustion of driving in Newcastle road construction and driving in both directions, paying that toll each way, through a tunnel under the Tyne River).