Rainy night in a Leeds hotel

A long day taking the Leeds Master Students on field trips to a limestone grassland and a woodland. 

I left the house before six-thirty, to get the ten to seven train - the first time I've been on  a train since November 2019. It felt fine  - lovely not to be crowded at any point on the journey.

I walked up to the University and we were all on the coach by just after 9 - masked and with our temperatures taken. I wasn't quite sure how I'd feel about this, but it seemed fine. The morning was spent at the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust reserve of Ledsham Banks, where they were taught how to recognize stands of homogeneous vegetation and then recorded two NVC quadrats - quite a feat when most of them are now to plant identification and scarcely anything was flowering! 

During the morning it transpired that the coach had been unable to turn in the usual parking place because of two logs and had then become stuck in the narrow lanes. Fortunately the driver managed to free the coach, but we had to walk through the village of Ledsham to get to his new parking place.

After a brief stop at Wetherby Services for toilets and coffee, we spent the afternoon at Middleton Woods, which was extremely wet underfoot, limiting the amount of quadrat recording that could be done. However, the students seemed to cope well here, as there were fewer species to record and more of them were in flower or were easily recognised trees.

We arrived back in Leeds a bit after five o'clock. Steve, the course organiser, had forgotten I was staying overnight in a local hotel, and needed to be home fairly early, so we went straight out for a Thai meal. Luckily I hadn't had much lunch, so I was hungry.

It had been intermittently rainy all day, but it really set in as we left the entrance. Steve insisted on walking me to my hotel, but I could see he was anxious to get his bus so after a while I persuaded him to let me go on alone, as I knew where I was heading. What I hadn't realised was that there were two hotels in Leeds with the same name, and in my haste to find the route on my phone at the end of the meal, I'd chosen the wrong one. So I then had a very soggy walk back to the centre of Leeds to find the right one!

I'd had no time to take any photographs during the day, so once I'd settled in to my room  I took a few views from the fourth floor window with my phone and amused myself by creating some double exposures. This was followed by a pretty early night as by this time I was exhausted!