The First Trip to Emmerdale Country
10-13 October 1998
There are times when your dream comes true. For me it was the moment I saw the first real Emmerdale scenery from the bus window - grazing sheep on a green hillside under a blue, un-English sky... Now we're finally there!
Since the beginning of 1998 I had translated Emmerdale for the Finnish channel MV3. A fourth translator was needed in the team, as in Finland two of English episodes are combined and the series was on every week day morning. Unfortunately I had missed the first nine months of the episodes shown in Finland, as I only started watching it when I knew I would become my job, in October 1997. Of course I fell head over heels in love with it and thus was rekindled my old love for England, that had started as a school girl in late 60's, when I worked for a summer at a small guest house, Verulam Lodge in Swanage, Dorset.
This love had been forgotten for some years when I translated American films for a movie channel.
Soon I started wanting to go to England, and to go to Emmerdale country. I managed to get a travel agency interested in my idea of a translator guided fan trip. MTV3 was also willing to launch a competition with this trip as first prize. It was to be a four day trip to the Yorkshire TV Emmerdale studios and the village of Esholt, where our episodes were still being filmed.
However all this took time to happen, and the publicity with the competition was rather late and the trip we had planned for spring did not happen, too few people had got the message. So it had to be postponed, and the hotel in Harrogate didn't have vacancies until in October. The start had not been smooth sailing, but when this trip actually happened, everything worked out perfect. Even the weather was brilliant, clear skies and sunshine most of the time, little cloudy in Scarborough the night we got there with showers the next morning, during our time for shopping. Actually Eija, our Finnish guide, who had lived in England for nearly 30 years was quite happy with the rain, as otherwise we would have had a wrong picture of the English weather.
As we moved from one location to another in our own bus, driven by our excellent driver Len, Eija gave a presentation of life in England and I then gave an excample how this particular feature has been brought up in Emmerdale. It soon became clear to everybody that Emmerdale is very much based on reality - a bit more spicy perhups, but on the whole.
As it happened, the English Travel Team had planned our route so that all the locations had a link to Emmerdale. The first two nights we stayed at a hotel in Harrogate, where the Emmerdale ladies like to shop. Third night we slept in Scarborough, where Kathy and Nick's mother and Alice's granny lives. Sarah and Jack met in York, when Sarah wanted to spend some time alone after baby Victoria had been ill. Sobebody remembered City Wall and York Minster from that episode.
Also quite recently in Finland Terry had gone to York to meet his wife Britt, who was working in a big pub there. When we were walking in York, I saw Terry's written under some shop windows and recollected that from the episode. And I thought to recognize the building of the pub as well. Everybody was very excited and took pictures. Back home, when I looked at the video, I realized I had been wrong, next time I did find the right house.
The last happy coincidence was the cattle market on Tuesday, our last day. Even Eija did not know of it, until the pub owner told her, when she mentioned we were Emmerdale fans from Finland.
On this trip I had a video camera with me and so I didn't take very many pictures. Also I had no idea I'd ever make my own web pages on Emmerdale, and so the picture gallery of the first trip is somewhat smaller than the others.
Also there were some technical problems with starting the pages, and that's why the pictures are numbered, so some kind of chronological order can be found following them.
