Day 16

World's End

If my impressions are correct, everyone wants to go to Scotland. Maybe, in some mystical way, it is everyone’s ancestral home. Maybe, for one day in the year everyone feels Scottish the way everyone feels Irish on St Patrick’s Day.

I don’t know. But we got our Scotland opportunity this last week midway through our stay in London.

We left Victoria Station Thursday on the 12:00 East Coast train bound for Edinburgh and arrived at 4:45 in the dark and gloom.

I asked a station worker how to get to Cowgate Street for our hotel. He pointed to an exit and said take the stairs to the street on the top of the hill then down the other side to the next street.



Easy enough, OK. So we headed out. What he didn’t say was that the steps went on forever, through one of those dark alleys found everywhere in Edinburgh called a “close.” There were maybe a hundred stairs in all, wet from recent rain and uneven.

At the top we found a wide street, called the Royal Mile because the Edinburgh Castle sits at one end atop the highest point in the city and HolyRood Palace sits at the other, the lower, end. As the way down to Cowgate was not obvious, we asked directions of a young woman who was handing out fliers for ghost tours.

Welcome to Edinburg.

Friday morning we got on a bus for a trip into the southern Highlands and a boat ride on Loch Ness, the Loch of Monster fame. We had walked the Royal mile in the dark after finding our hotel and after eating at the Wiski Bar and Restaurant, where I would recommend the leek soup. Edinburgh is an old city in around this Royal Mile, although it is a modern city too in areas we did not see. We were enormously impressed with the old buildings, nearly all of which were stone.

The bus tour was great for the first three and a half hours. The driver kept up a running commentary of historical information and ironic invention. Heading out of Edinburg he noted that we were passing the housing project that inspired the novel Trainspotting. It was one of two government housing projects in Edinburg, he noted, the other being home to some of his wife’s family for a time. It was kept up nicely and three meals a day, complements of the Queen. Then we passed a prison.

Three and a half hours into the bus tour, as we had just entered the Highlands themselves, our bus developed problems and had to stop. We were transferred to another bus on another bus line to join a different tour also in progress. The remaining nine hours of the tour was OK, but we missed the things we had signed up to see and we missed Peter (Petah), our driver.



Saturday we started early, found the sun shining, and walked along the Royal Mile hoping the things we wanted to see would be open. A few things like the Tenement Museum had already closed for the season, a possibility we had not considered. We saw St. Giles Cathedral. We toured the Castle. We stopped into many shops looking for Scottish things. We bought a few things at Scottish Heritage and Authentic Scotland, both run by Sikhs, which I thought was pretty funny. We were waited on in both places by Chinese women, possibly students, in kilts.



After our lunch at Deacon Brodie’s Café, we discovered the sun had turned to rain, what they call Scottish mist, so our wide-eyed street wandering was curtailed.

A handful of very drunk, very loud, very rambunctious college boys on the train home turned our “Quiet Car” into bedlam for a few hours, until they de-trained at Newcastle. I have written elsewhere about the joys of public drunkenness, so I won’t add more here except to say that relief on the train was profound when they departed.

When we got back to our flat at 11:30 Saturday night, after our interesting and rewarding few days in Scotland, we were glad for our small familiar rooms. We have only been here two months and we are only staying till mid-December, but when we opened the door and turned on the lights we felt we were home again.