Ireland, England, & Scotland

"This is where the fun begins" @ Chicago, United States, Illinois

2010-04-29T14:08:06.000Z

So, we get to the O'Hare airport in somewhat record time...not that we were in a rush or anything...and it's a good thing that we weren't because we found ourselves driving around O'Hare for maybe an hour? All we needed was to find the long term parking lot and we found nearly everything else. We finally ended up calling the number on the back of one of the tickets we received and was told what lot we were supposed to be in. This was pretty good news since we were looking at about $50/day in the lot we were in. When we got to our actual lot, it became $9/day...that's good news. On the way there, we saw huge plumes of black smoke rising from isengau...the airport...not gonna lie...kind of ominous. It certainly didn't do much for my confidence in the airline industry.

The amusement continued when we got to security. Jo and I got split up which isn't a big deal, except that we still needed to find foodstuffs and the security lady happen to tell me that everything in that department was only available prior to the security check. So, we went through the whole security process, I told her the news, and we decided to leave the secure area just as soon as we came in. The end of that story goes as you might expect, with us having to do the whole process all over again.

*Note to self - Don't go through security unless you're ready to get on the plane*

Speaking of which, it's about that time. We're almost ready to go get our boarding taken care of and hang out on the plane for the next hour or so until we take off. We're taking off at 7:15pm EST and will arrive in Dublin, Ireland at 7:50am local time. The direct flight will be around 7-8 hours. I expect the next update will be made at the hotel?

...hopefully no shards of ice or glass from the reak-havoc agrocrag will prevent us from getting to Shamrockville...

Stay tuned! :-D

Aer Lingus @ atlantic ocean

2010-04-30T07:21:29.000Z

Well this post was made with the knowledge that it might in fact be the most boring of all of them but since I must suffer being on this plane for this long, losing feeling to nearly every extremity, I figured that it’s only fair to have you sit through some mindless airplane banter of mine.

Topic 1: Things started off mostly right. They offered a limited bar…so I got some Jack Daniels and Jo got some really awful white wine. It really was quite awful…a prosecco I believe. Shortly thereafter, the brought out their very classy dinner menus which included some strangely worded chicken or ravioli. I think all of you know what I chose. In fact, Jo chose it too surprisingly. As it turns out, it really wasn’t that bad. I got creative and turned ravioli in to lasagna sandwich with the breadstick they gave me. I was proud. I just realized that I’m sitting here discussing food…so on to the next topic!

Topic 2: So, you know that feeling of “wow…I really hope I don’t end up sitting by those people on the plane”? Well unfortunately we ended up in this very situation. It seems that there may be a group of students who are along for our little trip across the Atlantic. To be honest, many of them aren’t too bad, but the ones that are…really are that bad. We’ve got 2 young ladies on board today that I will focus on. We shall call her Babs. She made it very apparent that she was where the proverbial bear shat in the woods. Her incessant need to run her mouth got pretty old pretty quick. She kind of seems like that girl in high school that nobody really likes but that everyone talks to because she makes them think that she’s what it’s about…and somehow she actually ended up being popular. When she speaks everyone listens…and she speaks a lot. Fortunately, shortly in to our flight, she relocated and I haven’t seen her since. The other princess was far more insufferable. I don’t think we had even gotten off the ground yet when we saw Repunzel brushing her long, golden locks…with a horse brush. We were watching her damaged hair bits float around the cabin…how nice. Shortly after taking off, I look over and she had her head hanging down…one of her mistresses were providing a general neck /back massage. It couldn’t have been easy for the servant since she was sitting directly to the left of her. In a later note, our leggings-laden Repunzel had found something amusing and had quite the chuckle. This in and of itself isn’t all that funny; the punch line is that her laugh resembled that of the “stage 5 clinger” in “Wedding Crashers.” I’ll leave the rest to you. My last note on her comes near the end of our flight. Our flight attendants have been coming around a good half dozen times always asking if we want coffee, tea, etc. Finally, it was “breakfast” time and the attendants had just finished getting everyone taken care of. The attendant was about 3 rows behind me when Repunzel speaks out…”Tea? Could I have some tea?” Aside from it being one of those “ughhhhh” moments, I had to mention it because the attendant herself made it point to display her dissatisfaction hahaha. She ended up making another trip back to the galley for her.

Topic 3: On a less invigorating note, I ended up watching some of my A+ videos during the flight; today’s topic, “Advanced Networking Concepts.” I won’t lie…it was pretty dry stuff. Jo ended up getting a few hours of sleep. I had about 20 minutes. Probably a bad choice being that we now get to go spend our day in Dublin. Anyhow, we’re on our decent now so I’ll wrap it up. Until next time!

Dublin, Ireland: The Battle of JetLag @ Dublin, Ireland

2010-04-30T21:22:05.000Z

We arrived at Dublin’s airport and were promptly ushered underneath the airport where we had to go make our way through what I considered the catacombs of the airport just to get our luggage and go through customs. I made it through just fine, Jo did not. You guessed it – it’s because she’s Italian and in the land of the pale! Actually, that last bit was a lie, kind of. She actually did make it past the customs guy; she just couldn’t make it past the physical gate. So myself and 2 other passengers on our flight were on the other side of the gate and there Jo stands, waiting for it to open again. Finally, the guy in front of me had told her that she just needs to push it open. Sure enough, she got through just fine. Fail lol. The other neat thing about Ireland in general seems to be that nearly everything is still written in Gaelic and translated in to English. This kind of shocked me because while Gaelic is way awesome, it’s also way dead. Really, it’s a dead language, even in its own country.

We spent a good deal of time walking around the city a half-dozen times in search for things like the train station (that we will need to board tomorrow morning) and lunchytime solutions. We did get our tickets lined up, so tomorrow will be an early morning. We also found a super yummy French restaurant that we decided to go to. She had a pesto chicken panani while I had the lamb. Both was quite delish.

During our travels, and I mean every part of this, we counted every individual that was wearing leggings. Apparently, leggings are still quite the thing over here. To be honest, I thought it was quite nice. I don’t see what people’s problem is with leggings. None the less, we ended counting just shy of 100 individuals during our 2 hours of walking around.

I’m still sitting pretty on 2 hours of sleep during the past 30. Tomorrow holds a visit to Wicklow, Ireland which boasts a very nice national park. Early morning starts at 6am. Hopefully the weather will be a bit more stable tomorrow than today. We had the pleasure of watching it shine brightly, then hail thick chunks of ice and finally rain within about 10 minutes. Though it’s supposed to reach a high of 54* and rain mostly all day. We’ll see how this one goes.

On a few other fun notes, around 10pm or so, we were just leisurely laying around when our door was temporarily opened a few inches. Let me also add that the door automatically locks when it shuts...just like every other hotel room out there. When we looked, everyone was gone, so we weren't quite sure what happened...if it was security providing us with safety and homeliness or some drunken Irish delinquents that were having fun at our expense. Sigh. Consequently, Jo ended up being paranoid for the next hour or so when I was most definitely sleeping because she thought the boogeyman was coming to get here. (Note: The boogeyman doesn't typically travel overseas.)

And on a final note, softwater is definitely something I'll be missing. Jo was complaining about how it made her hair feel nasty. I didn't quite understand how softwater can make one's hair feel nasty, particularly after mine feeling so very nice, but I digress. I will certainly miss the miracle that is softwater.

Ireland: Wicklow and the last day in Dublin @ Wicklow, Ireland

2010-05-01T22:52:08.000Z

Jo here!

That’s right, I get to update my little bits as well while we’re here on our trip. So first off, I decided this post I wanted to give a little shout out to Tony (thanks for reading buddy, sorry I stole Jes away from you for these weeks!)

So today as most of you should know was our day trip to Wicklow. Now here is when I have a little confession to make, and that involves why I decided we needed to come to the Wicklow National Forest! I am a fan of the chick flicks and in the movie “PS I Love You” the two main characters meet when she has gotten lost wandering around the Wicklow forest. So of course we had to go! Jes knows nothing of this, so I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to know that our random day trip had girlie intentions behind it.

And no harm done, because we actually never made it into the forest. Our day started bright and early at the wee hour of 1am…States time that is. 6am came too early to me, so I made the executive decision that we would wait for the 12pm train instead of the 7.30am one. Luckily it was only raining a little bit, and there weren’t many people around so we were able to stretch out and enjoy the ride. Of course Jes had the thrill of being annoyed by the laughing baby (who does that really? He does that’s who….I found it incredibly cute and amusing though), and making a ton of fun of the few other UK-ers joining us. The train took us right along the coast, and so we had a beautiful view of the ocean on one side and hills and mountain country side on the other. It was actually quite beautiful and would have been worth the train ride in and of itself. An hour later the train dropped us off right outside of the town of Wicklow, and the mountains were about 20 kilometres away. Since we didn’t have a way to get into the country side, and we wouldn’t quite be able to walk there and back plus do hiking in the same day, we decided to make our way into this hill filled town!

Of course we stick out like pretty sore thumbs no matter where we go, and this place was no exception. Filled with many “soccer hooligans”, it was clear that this was the football town of the greater area. It had one main street that we walked and found fun things like the Wicklow Wine Company (who promptly kicked us out jokingly but somewhat serious because we were just browsing), and a “Fast Food American” which had all sorts of greasy food that you could get to go. Classy I know. After walking around for about an hour and a half, we decided that we would cut our day trip short and catch the earlier train. We had about an hour to kill, so we decided to stop and grab a quick bite to eat at a quaint little hotel restaurant.

I should have been a little more thoughtful because European lunches tend to take much longer than the hour that we had to spare. Not to mention we had at least another 20 minute walk to the train station. However to start our lunch came with a potato and leek soup and it was strangely good! Of course this is my opinion, I’ll let you use your imagination to picture the face Jes made. I got a lovely pasta meal and Jes got half of a chicken with a deep fried banana! It was the strangest thing I’ve tried in quite a while. So after waiting for our food very patiently (which was incredible I have to add, I wish we could have spent more time enjoying it), I promptly asked for our bill with the food and we inhaled it! Then since we didn’t feel like having an after lunch marathon run I decided to ask the waitress to call us a cab to pick us up and take us to the train station. I’m pretty sure that after Jes and I switched our appetizer, and asking for the bill, along with us eating our food like we hadn’t eaten in days, and adding the cherry of asking for a taxi made us the typical American’s who cannot show their face in Wicklow again.

Now, our cabbie is a different story. He was fantastic! He asked if we were Australian which is just crazy to me. Now I know I sound funny from time to time, but Australian? We just had to laugh and explain that we were from Michigan and were there on holiday. Apparently we went to the wrong town, and he explained that we missed the hottest tourist attraction by a few kilometers. But no matter, I enjoyed our little jaunt! And to top it all off, he was pleasant, could drive, and when we were leaving he said “Good day, cheerio!” I couldn’t believe it! We got cheerio-ed! Love it!

After another hour train ride we were back in Dublin where the rain had stopped and it was nice and sunny again. We decided to have a relaxing afternoon of me sleeping and Jes spending some quality time uploading pictures/video’s onto Facebook. After Jes tried to wake me up once, he let me sleep for about 45 minutes, which was incredibly lovely! Then of course he was a brat while waking me up, but story of my life right?

We were then going to go to the pirate restaurant (we have no idea what it is called, but it’s on the same block as our hotel and had a giant pirate on the sign, so of course we had to go), but as we walked in we discovered that we were not properly dressed. Good for them over here to not let people who look like crap come into their restaurants! So we went to the Chinese restaurant that is also located in our hotel. Jes decided that he was going to be brave and try the duck and some yummy chicken/corn soup (I am so proud, yesterday was lamb and today was duck, hooray for trying all sorts of new things!) and I had a sort of sweet and sour chicken. We decided while in Dublin, might as well drink! So Jes found an incredible bottle of red wine for us to try. I got to do the whole, here smell it, take a sip, give the approval to the waiter. So awesome. Not that we don’t do that in the States, but it seems to have a whole new level of class in another country.

Being in the land of the loud and the drunk, our dinner was not without its own built in entertainment and obnoxious drunks at the table next to us. There were about seven guys, I would put in their thirties, who had all sorts of Guinness glasses around the table and were clearly quite drunk. It took me quite a bit to realize that they were in fact speaking English, because after a few pints their accents were so incredibly thick is sounded like a different language. The best way to describe them were the small little office aliens that were in “Men in Black”. You know, the ones who smoke and drank and were the “sorry little ingrates”. Seriously, they were them, but in human form. No joke, we have video to prove it.

Dinner itself was incredible, and so was the wine (despite the fact that it turned my tongue and teeth an eerie shade of clear-ish blue), dessert was to die for, can’t complain one ounce. Of course, according to our waiter, Jes was eating his duck entirely wrong, and as he said “No, you’re just not eating it properly, that’s not a meal”. Apparently cutting off of the duck fat proves to make for an improper dining experience! So he brought us out a whole other plate of chicken fried rice. All in all I would say it was an excellent way to end our last night here in Dublin!

On a personal note, I have absolutely loved Dublin! The rain and the smells, everything reminds me of Paris (just on a less condensed and compacted scale than Paris is) and I am absolutely in love and quite comfortable here. I’m sad to go, but I know London is going to be amazing and Scotland will just be the best. I can’t wait!

So I suppose now that I have rambled on and on and on I should probably turn the handy dandy netbook back over to Jes so he can publish this and do his thing while I get packed up and ready for bed. We have a cab all set up to pick us up at 6.30 in the morning to take us to the airport for our flight to London. If anyone has made it all the way through this post, hooray and thanks for reading! Next stop, London baby! (Friends reference anyone?)

Cheerio!

Our London experience... @ London, United Kingdom

2010-05-02T19:56:28.000Z

We got up this morning around 5:45am, scheduled a taxi pickup at 6:30am, and was scheduled to be on a flight to London by 8:30am…or so we thought.

Actually, most everything went moderately well until after we got dropped off at the airport. Our taxi driver was slightly less comfortable to be around than Wicklow’s but it was equally as nice, equally as pleasant, and equally as stinky. And when I say “stinky,” I don’t mean like Gary Indiana stinky or dirty diapers stinky, but that slightly foul old man butt crusty stank that seems to be omnipresent, at least in the UK. Anyhow, we got to the airport in about half the time as we did when we arrived which was nice. We went to the self-check-in station and were all ready to go drop off our check bags when we noticed our boarding passes talkin’ about boarding at 20:00 and arriving at 21:15 or something redonkulous. As it turns out, the trip was booked in US time, not UK time like all the other ones, so we were basically a good 10-12 hours early. Now for those of you who were following along with us for the Florida trip, you may remember something like this happening last time. Fortunately though, the only difference is that we nearly got stranded there. This time, Jo was able to get us aboard a flight that left like 10 minutes later than our original flight which was rather convenient. We then go through the actual personnel-style check in process and do that whole thing. What was even better was that unlike our flight in to Ireland, we didn’t get charged $100 for our overweight checked bags. It really kind of made up for the rough start.

We made it to the gate with about an hour to spare and so we decided that we should go get a “traditional Irish breakfast” which we hadn’t really done yet. Jo didn’t care for most of it, not that it should be a surprise to anyone. We got on board our flight, made fun of the head flight attendant that was wearing a really stupid hat, and proceeded to sit around and listen to more screaming children as we waited for the tug-car to get towed out from behind us and be replaced with a new one to get us the hell out of Ireland. Oh but wait, there’s more. We finally start to take off when a horrendous high-pitched squeal sounded throughout the cabin…and it lasted forever! And by “forever,” I meant like 15-20 minutes but even still, when it’s constant like that for that long, one seriously becomes concerned for their aural health. Anyhow, we got off the plane and waited for a good 45 minutes for our luggage to show up. Then, we made our way to the subway which was amusing. We got to wrangle our 65 lbs bags up and down several sets of manual stairs. We got to “tube” our way through about 17 stops. When we got off the subway, we were greeted with “dreadful” weather and a bunch of London assholes. No I’m serious, the people here are just awful, and I do mean everyone. Everyone from the scum on the streets to the heinous bitch behind the front desk of the freaking Raddison were all equally pompous; and not the good kind of pompous that we pretend to be back in the states, but the kind of pompous where you seriously can’t walk down the trashy streets of London without feeling like everyone else knows that they are better than you. (That statement is confirmed by Jo.)

On top of this comes the complete lack of decent restaurants, pubs, etc. Though, the McDonald’s was quite nice. Yeah that’s right, I came to London and had McDonald’s. And I’d do it again. Now I know what you’re thinkin’, “You know, you were in only part of London and it’s not all that way.” Well, I’m in London and you are not, so I think I’ll be the one to judge. ;-) No seriously though, it’s so bad here that Jo and I are currently planning to leave our even shittier hotel a day early (even though we’ve been here a total of only a few hours) and go somewhere, anywhere else. We are debating many options and probably by the time this is typed up, we may know what the plan is.

In other news, the only thing that’s on TV in the UK is in fact the news. And the only news out there is Obama headin’ to Louisiana, some Snooker thing, Greece heading to hell in a proverbial handbasket and every few hours, the governmental campaign here in the UK. Even the obligatory food shows that run 24/7 aren’t on. I’m also having issues getting videos uploaded to facebook so hang tight for those. Also, we can't make outgoing calls without being charged like $45/min to do so...so yeah we can't really do that. I love you Ma! :-D

At the end of the day though, this is going to be a bangin’ trip so sorry for the pessimism thus far. I do believe today / tomorrow is/was the worst of it. London just isn’t the place for us. We will be going off-schedule tomorrow one way or another so stay tuned as I’ll be keeping you updated here. :-)

P.S. Is anyone out there?

Change of plans - I'll be in Scotland 'afore ye (Part I) @ Edinburgh, United Kingdom

2010-05-03T22:30:27.000Z

As you may remember, we arrived in London, England yesterday early afternoon. When we got to London, we realized just how awful it actually was. I won’t get in to the omplete list but it definitely includes things like a half-functional room in the “Raddison a piss-poor entertainment district, very unpleasant city folk and the like. We made the collective decision to forgo the London plans and leave a day earlier than expected. The question then became where exactly should we go? We had considered a few options that involved mainland Europe and borrowing a day or two from Scotland, but we decided we would simply enhance our Scotland adventure by adding in a few a new features to the newly revised itinerary. We have decided to add in a very high – highland aspect to the trip. The plan now is to start in Edinburgh and hang out for a few days doing some castle stuffs and other edinburghly things, take a train north for 7-8 hours stopping in Inverness for a few hours and continuing on to our destination of Thurso. We will spend a day in this small fishing city, follow it up by taking a day trip up to the most northern island of Scotland (known as Strombaly), and will finish the north up with a day trip to Wicklow in the north east which we expect to be quite small and homely. We will head down to Glasgow for the day and will be dropping by Oban for a few days where we will certainly be checking out the distillery, the coliseum, and most definitely…Doc, Tony, and the Alma College Choir. We then head west to visit the Isle of Mull and even further west to the Isle Iona. We will finish the trip in Glasgow for an additional night before heading to the Glasglow airport and begin the journey home.

We spent nearly half a day contemplating what to do with this schedule. It was taxing but after we did figure it all out, Jo was magical enough to be able to make it all happen on the schedule and such. She’s good at those kinds of things. Even though I always give her a hard time, she does know how to talk to people in other countries. Because of our hours of collaboration and planning, and because of her on-the-fly travel prowess, we are currently on the plane from London, England to Edinburgh, Scotland which obviously wasn’t really in the original itinerary.

Our morning began very leisurely as Jo wanted to sleep in (as always) and so we really didn’t get up until after 10:30pm. Though it’s somewhat warranted after spending nearly every moment from 1pm until midnight figuring out our new options. I even found myself sucked in to the Scottish Parliament debates (as the election will occur in only a matter of days and we will be here to see it happen.) until way late at night. Anyhow, Jo got the taxi arranged and we went down to check out for the day. They ended up charging us for the mini-bar which we had in our room. We were like “WTF mates?! We didn’t have any mini-bar-ness and if we had known we’d be charged for it, maybe we should have!” As it turns out, when you remove an item from its designated location, you have only a few moments before it becomes registered as a sale. Last night, I took out a mini bottle of something and showed it to Jo and put it back. Oh wells – it was all fixed. We then found our taxi driver who was of middle-eastern decent. I will spare you the 45 minutes of awkward travelling banter and just leave you with a few notes on this. He hit me at least half-dozen times. He made me sit up front with him and shove Jo in the back with my checked bag and carry on. He smelled funny. We were driving around in a Mercedes. And, the damn car nearly took my head off when I got in, and when I did manage to shove my big American ass in the hotwheels-sized vehicle, I had the pleasure if getting roasted out (it was hot) whilst sitting with my head and neck tilted to the side because I was too tall. I now have a headache. Oh, and he gave Jo a hug and told her to come visit him again when she has had two babies. We passed a sign on the side of the road that said “Humps Ahead” which I certainly found amusing. Apparently speed bumps are greater than or equal to “humps.” Oh oh oh, and speaking of humps, the taxi driver made sure that I checked out this “very fine young Indian girl” who we had passed on the way to the Airport. I had to say something so the best I came up with was “well we could always pick her up but she will have to sit in the back with Jo and have my luggage sit on her lap (which barely fit in the seat as it were).” Ahhh hooray for a much needed comedic break. Jo wants everyone to know that he may have made the London trip worth it for her.

When we got in to the airport, the first thing I saw was a freaking sniper walking around the balcony on the perimeter. And yes, he was a sniper because he definitely had an m-15 or something. How bad-ass do you think he feels though, really? “Yeah, I’m just taking my sweet time walking around all extra slow with an oversized gun waiting to shoot someone.” Anyhow, the airport was nice and huge. Jo ended up getting frisked by security. It was probably something similar to the “Italian in Algiers” situation (bad joke intentional.) She sounded off the alarm and so she got the privilege to be frisked. When it was all over, she was describing it all to me. I ended up really having a good laugh when she mentioned that the frisker (?) was reaching around behind her checking for badstuff and when she did, Jo wanted to give her a hug lol. (For those that don’t follow, it’s because she was basically being hugged by the…frisker.) (We found some “Tin Duck” restaurant that was the first good breakfast and/or lunch that we’ve had since we’ve been out. Though, we nearly walked out after waiting 20 minutes for our server to appear. Jo even ended up saying “I’m so baffled right now” after watching like 3 servers walk past us as if we hadn’t existed. In summary, it sucked but it was all good (literally) and we made it to our gate in time. This time, our seats on the plane were quite decent, except yet again to my immediate back left, a screaming child resided. Whyyyyy must I always sit nearly directly in front of a family of 6…4 of which are below the age of 4?! Ugh.

End of Part I...

Change of plans - I'll be in Scotland 'afore ye (Part II) @ Edinburgh, United Kingdom

2010-05-03T22:45:22.000Z

...continued...

The good news is that it was nice outside and we made great time getting in to Edinburgh, Scotland. We got off the plane, did the whole luggage thing, and found us a taxi to get us to the Jury Inn hotel in central Edinburgh. We ended getting an Englishmen driving a small midget car (also nearly taking my head off…except this time I was expecting it). He was actually quite pleasant and gave us a great deal of information about tips and tricks relative to our journey. In fact, one of the things I had asked him has us heading towards the mountains here tomorrow morning. More on that later. Jo researched the Jury Inn back in the states and found it to be a good deal monetarily as well as higher quality. When we were dropped off, we were very happy to see that we were directly across from the legendary Edinburgh Castle, the train station that we will be utilizing, and walking distance from nearly everything in Edinburgh. We got our room hooked up and found that it was considerably larger than the one in both Dublin and London by about twice the size. Though, the bed was about half the size than the other two haha. We found it had a huge bathroom and wired internet access which is so very nice and highly underrated. (That’s why I’m currently uploading the first videos right now.) The best part; out our front window is an overview of the entire city, with the centerpiece being Edinburgh Castle! It’s pretty jaw dropping really. How many people wake up to castles outside their windows? Overall, we are both quite happy with the (last minute) arrangement.

We wandered around the area and found a good dozen dining areas that offer some very intriguing menus of both the Scottish and Non-Scottish varieties…we merely chose the wrong this afternoon haha. I won’t get too far in to it because I don’t really care…we have tons of options. Though I will say that a notable topic is that Jo apparently doesn’t dig cheap single malt scotch. I ordered a 21 year Glenfiddich single malt, and Jo got a starter scotch. She definitely didn’t like it and had it switched for the same thing I had, and she drank it all. She did make the comment though, “I think I still prefer having some wine in France.” The last note I’ll make on this topic is how much disdain I have for these extra long European meals. Seriously, I’m noticing that everywhere I go, they give you like an hour between the time you order your appetizer and when they deliver your meal. What the hell am I there to do? Eat. Not wait around for an hour. If I wanted to waste an hour, I’d get on facebook. -Sigh-. We both didn’t care for our food when it came but the scotch was good, so we cut our losses and went to Subway. We walked around a bit more and found our way back to the hotel.

Next up, Jo’s going to hop on the netbook here and solidify our plans for tomorrow morning. We really don’t know what those are going to be yet but they may involve taking a bus in to the mountains in the morning and spending the afternoon in Edinburgh Castle. Haggis is also on the menu. It will be a very busy day tomorrow so expect another huge update.

On other unrelated notes: The news here is really interesting, as are the commercials. We both seems to like the BBC. However, I do find it interesting that a good 50-75% of the BBC is broadcasting news stories on the USA. I also have been continuing to follow the election stuff that’s going on right now. Oh, and Shcopey has informed me that triptracker.net makes you create an account in order to comment on these posts, which I wasn’t aware of so yeah, sorry about that. Though I do like that it didn’t seem stop some of our extra special viewers! :-D Oh and in other news, The Icelandic volcano is at it again and Ireland and Scotland has banned all flights in to and out of their respective countries until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. The good news is that we’ve done all of the flying that we are going to be doing as of this morning until we come home in a week or so, the bad news is that we may not make it home if it keeps up like last time. Haha. And lastly, it’s awfully nice that BP has said that they will be 100% responsible for the oil slick and that they take full responsibility for the clean up as well because last I knew, they have absolutely no choice in the matter and their asses will definitely be paying for al of it and cleaning it up with their own manpower along with the others from our country. Obama pwnd BP and that is all.

The cross country tour: Edinburgh (Part I) @ Edinburgh, United Kingdom

2010-05-05T09:46:51.000Z

I will start this entry by telling you that we are currently on the ScotRail train from Edinburgh (southeast) to Inverness which will ultimately lead us to Thurso (far north). So far, we are quite pleased with the comfort level of this long 7+ hour journey. The seats are quite nice and purple, I’ve got a nice little table here to type up this post, and the best of it is that Jo and I are currently occupying 4 seats, mostly because we can…because we’re American. Jo’s rockin’ some Sudoku and so I figured I should get on here and prepare what may be the longest post yet. I will go through the events from yesterday and take you up through now. I will also be giving you some of the thoughts that have come to me as of late. So, take your bathroom break now, go get your popcorn and reese’s pieces and get ready because here it comes!

-The mountains-
We started our day at 8am. I woke up with a very sore throat, so much so that it was burning every time I would breath, drink, eat, swallow, whatevs. The plan was to get do the quick breakfast thang and hop aboard a train to get in to some mountains that we saw on the way in from the airport. This way, we would have day light when mountaineering. Then, we changed that so we could go to Edinburgh Castle first since it had a closing time in the early evening. So we trekked our way through the city trying to find the best way in to the Caslte from our hotel, which I should remind you was directly outside of our window. :-) Anyhow, there we were just trekking along side of this fancy modern looking building made of steel and such when I started getting excited. I didn’t realize it until that moment, but when I did, I had remembered that 4 years ago almost exactly to the day, I was in this same spot at the foothills of a mountain. In fact, it was there that I had gone up that mountain a bit and played a few tunes on my bagpipes. There are some photos on facebook of this if you look for the Scotland trip of 2005/2006. Well, I had explained all of this to Jo and that is when I convinced her to hike up the mountain with me. It was a pretty good time. It was definitely a good thing to do after sitting around on a plane for 7+ hours on the flight here, and all of the driving around the city. It was certainly nice now that we’re on a 7+ hour train ride. We found a fun outcrop in the side of the mountain where we took a 20 minute break. I recorded a good 10 minute video while I was there. We made it down the rest of the way and the entire thing took about an hour and a half. When we got to the end, we saw another far more treacherous looking mountain (which we later learned was a volcano) and decided to give it a shot as well. This time however, there wasn’t a nice path way or nice leveled trails. This time, we had the pleasure of climbing nearly vertical “stairs” to get to the top of what we later found out was Arthur’s Seat. The “stairs” were more like piled rocks in a stair like formation. Every level was different. We had no idea how long it would take to get to the top and we weren’t able to see more than 10 – 20 feet ahead of us without there being another jagged turn so we just kind of went on. We must have been a good 90% complete when it started sprinkling. Normally I don’t cry much about rain but having rain on already unstable piles of rocks really wouldn’t make for a great time. So, we decided to turn around and head back down in the event that it did start raining (which isn’t a bad bet in Scotland). On our way back down, Jo heard some woman say that it takes 20 minutes to get to the top. We had been climbing for nearly that. We may have been right near the peak when we made that decision haha. Anyhow, we got back down and decided to walk around the foot of the mountain to get back to where we started. As it turns out, people apparently drive to Arthur’s Seat and then climb it, not hike the mountain prior and then go climb it. In all, it was a good time and I’m glad we did it. Though I did end up getting a sunburn on my face and neck that is still showing up pretty red. :-(

(Jo’s going to take over this next bit)

-Back to Central Edinburgh-
On our trek back to the city of Edinburgh, we ran in to a group of protesters at the parliament building. Now as some of you may or may not know, I love a good protest! They really are the best. This group was a bit small, I would put them at about 30 or so and they lacked any and all rhythm, so their beating and chanting was not as powerful an effective as it could have been (but this is just my protesting opinion). We never were able to figure out what it was they were actually protesting about, but since it was outside of the Scottish Parliament building my guess it had something to do with a touchy subject in this election that happens on Thursday I believe. After watching the protesters attempt to make a point and the police officers yawning at them, we decided to move on and try to find a bus that would take us back into the city and up to Edinburgh Castle. We spotted a lone bus stop, and although there was no map or anything, it did say that it heads into the city, so that was good enough for us! Once we waited for just under 5 minutes an empty city bus rolled up and let us on. Of course I first asked him (from outside the bus, which made things exceedingly difficult until both Jes and the driver managed to shoo me onto the bus) what was the best way to get to the castle and that I let him know that we didn’t have any exact change to give him for our tickets. But since we’re in Scotland now and not in London (thank goodness), he was kind enough to tell us to get on and not worry about the tickets. He then said he would drive us around and get us close to the castle and give us directions from there. It’s amazing how far asking for help and a smile can get you! Seriously, the people of Scotland could not be any nicer!

Once we got back into the city centre, we decided that it would be a good idea to grab some lunch before we head into the castle for the next few hours. Afraid of another iffy lunch, we found a place that we knew there would be something that both of us would like. We spotted a nice little place that wasn’t crowded and had simple but very tasty looking food. While we were in there Jes found a wonderful salmon dish that looked and tasted amazing (really, the best salmon ever). I personally have had salmon or fish for every meal since we’ve been in the UK. Now I love fish, specifically salmon, but I was ready for a nice pasta or sandwich or anything that did not come swimming onto my plate from the sea. However, this restaurant had a salmon fettuccine with a white wine cream sauce, and well I just could not turn that down. It was absolutely incredible! It may have quite possibly been the best meal we’ve had while here. Now from here it does go a bit downhill from here because we ordered desert and it seemed they had forgotten about us. Specifically because we saw the two loan chefs there were come up from the kitchen to sit at the bar and eat lunch. That and we waited twice as long for our two small desserts than we did for our actual food. Jes was, well kindly put, exceedingly unhappy. Everything had gone so well, but as you all know from his previous post, waiting patiently in a restaurant is not one of his fortes. Though this time it was merited, because they actually did forget about us! But they figured it out and brought out our desserts free of charge and all was well. I would absolutely go back there again and recommend it to anyone. I was extremely satisfied.

While we walked along the “Royal Mile” (or High Street technically) on our way to the castle, there are just tons and tons of shops amongst the restaurants. Most of them are the tourist shops that you would expect to find in any “tourist” area. There were “kilts” you could buy all around, and the scarves were just flowing everywhere! You couldn’t walk past a shop without seeing walls of family clan scarves and such. Though it was sad to me that both of Jes’s family clan scarves were quite difficult to find and not as popular as many of the others. The highlight of this bit for me was when we went to a whole kilt making factory. You could see how they made the fabric (even buy yards of clan fabric) that was in every single clan possible I’m pretty sure. Most of them looked fairly typical to me (the green plaid you expect to see), and then there were the really interesting ones. My favorites were the purple Montgomery one, the yellow MacLeod, the black and white (I don’t remember the clan, but it was awesome), and the Burberry styled one. It really was an incredible building. There was even a weapons area and I got to hold a Claymore! I felt extremely epic, though I’m sure if I tried actually doing anything with it I would just fail miserably. Jes got to hold a few other swords and was pretending to be epic and manly (which worked out a bit for him).

To be continued...

The cross country tour: Edinburgh Castle (Part II) @ Edinburgh, United Kingdom

2010-05-05T12:04:05.000Z

...continued...

(Jo)

--Edinburgh Castle--
We finally ended up making it to the castle (a good hour after we had planned due to our shopping detours). We decided against the audio tour (complete with headsets) because frankly it was just too much history for us to handle. The castle itself was beautiful, it’s amazing what they were able to do with all the rocks and that an entire community actually lived there. It was during these walks and reading all the signs and history of battles that I wondered where Italy was during this time (since Jes had his people here, I was wondering where mine were gosh darnnit!). Then I remembered the whole Roman Empire thing, the rise and fall, and well, that was it. So just in case anyone was wondering, absolutely no Italian culture or history in Scotland. At least in Edinburgh. So after wondering around for about an hour and a half, we decided that we had enough of the castle (we saw the important stuff I would say; crown jewels, war memorial, all that jazz) and we decided to call it about the end to a really long day.

One fun side note, on our way leaving the castle there was a street performer standing in a doorway. And not just any street performer, he was an invisible one! Imagine the robot or statue performers you can find in big cities (I’ve seen them in Vegas and in Paris), the ones who don’t move and look just completely unreal until you walk by them and then terrify an unknowing passerby. Though this guy was clever, he was in a suit, no head or neck, and a hat and sunglasses floating right where his head should have been. He happily waved at us, and followed and played with other people that were around. This of course merited a pound or two, and while I was hoping for him to dance, we got some movement and interaction. One of the best street guys I’ve seen in some time.
There was one more thing we had to do though in our very long day. Just imagine what this could mean. Oh that’s right (and I SO wish it wasn’t), we needed to try haggis.

You just can’t come to Scotland and not have any, and while I was absolutely petrified of how it would be and what would happen if I had sheep stomach in my own stomach (the thought of that already is making me cringe, bleh!), I knew that it had to be done. We both decided we would rather do it here in the city than up in the highlands where they may actually go out and get the stomach fresh (cringing again). So we found a place on High Street that looked decent enough, sat ourselves down and decided that we were going to order Haggis, Neeps, and Tatties. Of course I have no idea exactly what is in haggis (nor do I want to know right now), or what neeps and tatties are (though Jes informs me that they are a form of turnips and potatoes). We ended up getting some appetizers to try and get our stomachs ready first, and lots of water as well. When it came out I was fairly ready to just leave, but I decided to be open minded. The “neeps” were just terrible, though Jes said they tasted like mashed up carrots. We then both tried the haggis and had about the opposite reaction. I found that the flavor itself wasn’t terrible (it tasted and had a flavor close to Italian sausage), the texture was just dreadful. It was like chewing on bits of warm rubber band, but you know it is a stomach rubber band. Jes strangely didn’t mind the texture (everyone join me in a collective bleh and gag there), but he didn’t like the flavor (go figure there). All in all, we came, we ate (one bite), and we concurred (in my opinion).

(End Jo, Begin Jes)

And now that Jo got most of the fun bits, you all now get the pleasure of hearing me rant about a semi-related topic, among a few others. Then I’ll give it back to her so she can go over even more fun bits!

My first topic, glasses. Why would any country, province, whatever prefer to have quarter-sized glasses? I realize that usually if you’re drinking something, it’s usually out of a bottle around here, but how do people stay hydrated? And even outside of that and from a business perspective, that’s twice as much work to be done, which to me equals about half the efficiency of that decision. If a server has to keep coming filling up the glass, he/she would be doing twice is much work and at my table for twice the amount of time than if they had just had normal sized glasses? And in the case of the hotel’s get a new glass” policy, that’s like 4x as many dishes to be done. So there ya have it folks. Small glasses = restupido.

Now, be warned. This next topic may be a more sensitive one and may not be suitable for all viewers. Digression is advised. Last warning, if you’re sensitive to negative feelings, skip to the net paragraph. On a more serious note, I just have to say how offended I am to have seen a good half of the Scottish shops (where one would go to procure highland outfitting, bagpipes, etc) being run, managed, and otherwise represented by foreigners. I won’t get too detailed on it but these people are coming here, bastardizing the Scottish heritage, putting it on display to make a sale, and are representing traditional Scottish culture while having the testicular fortitude to impress their own cultures and views at the same time. It makes me sick. It’s like if I were to move to China, open up a Chinese restaurant, and serve my customers whilst wearing my kilt. It would never happen. I’d likely get my ass kicked, if not lynched. It’s disgusting. It really just makes me sick. How dare you sons of bitches. Go bastardize someone else’s culture. If Sir William Wallace were alive, he’d certainly not allow for that garbage. Alas, he is no longer with us and is likely rolling in his grave right now.

And for my last arbitrary topic today, I should mention that my diet has consisted mostly of sodium and potatoes since I’ve gotten to the U.K. I do believe I‘ve had some form of potatoes for every single meal since we’ve gotten here. I do like potatoes but boy do I miss fruits and veggies, and cereal for that matter.

To be continued...

The cross country tour: Journey to Thurso (Part III) @ Inverness, United Kingdom

2010-05-05T12:51:14.000Z

...continued...

(Jo)

And I’m back for the fun stories. Actually, I’m not sure how fun it will be, but we’ll see!

This morning started bright and early for us, I think the first alarm went off at about 6am, and I believe we finally pried ourselves out of bed around 6.30am. Our train was scheduled to leave the station at 8.30am, and we still had all of our packing to do (you have a ton of stuff when you’re traveling around for just about 3 weeks let me tell you what! As a side note I cannot wait to be in Thurso because we’ll be able to settle in for a whopping four days, hooray!). So one we got all of our stuff together and were ready for the day, we decided that we should have some breakfast before we started our long train journey today.

Cue my first rant of these posts. The “traditional breakfast”. Oh what I would give for some French toast, or even decently made eggs. So let me explain this breakfast that I’ve had to sit through quite a few times now. The eggs come as either scrambled (watery one’s at that too) or fried. I know that Jes is a fan of them, and mister Danny Balger has had them as well and likes them, but I just cannot get into them! They’re greasy and hard. Maybe I just haven’t had them made right, but I’ll pass for now. Then there’s the meat. They have “bacon” (which is really just slices of ham), and the sausage (I don’t know what kind it is, but I had one bite and it was like creamy meat and I haven’t touched one since). Then comes the fun bits. They always come with a steamed tomato, black pudding (if you are really curious, Google it. I won’t spoil the appetite of all of our readers with its description, but trust me, it is just terrible), a potato cake, and beans. You can add toast if you’d like, but that’s basically it. I think if I have to attempt to stomach too many more of these breakfasts I might rebel against all breakfasts for a while when we come back. End my breakfast rant.

So once we got done eating, we checked out of our wonderful Jurys Inn hotel (I would recommend it to anyone traveling to Edinburgh!), and walked down to the train station. Once we were there we collected our tickets, found our platform, and got on our train! And well that is where this post first started. Like Jes said, these trains are great. The seats were comfortable, we have a tabel, a huge window to look out of, and it’s not incredibly crowded at all. The first leg of our journey was just over 3 hours long and that took us from Edinburgh to Inverness. I did in fact rock the Sudoku, and Jes wrote the start of this post. The view was just absolutely breathtaking. There are no words really. We went along the coast for about an hour before traveling up into the mountains. There was the best combination of sun, clouds, mist, snow (that’s right, snow, in May! On top of the mountains of course), and mountains. Those will definitely be some of the pictures to check out, though I’m sure they won’t be nearly as beautiful or entertaining as the view was in person, but for us this long train ride and those particular bits were worth every pence and the days travel!

We stopped in Inverness and had a layover for about two hours. We decided instead of venturing out into the city with all of our luggage and such, we would just have lunch at a pub right there in the train station. So we went in and I kindly asked the woman at the bar (who looked like the one in charge) if we could have a table for lunch. She said we were welcome to a table but the chef took the day off so all they were serving was breakfast. So, I have a few points to make. First off, it’s the middle of the week, and the chef took a day off? Ok, I can overlook that (this was what Jes first thought), but you only have one chef? This Is not a small train station, and you’re a pub, with one chef? What sense does this make? And thirdly, all they were serving was the traditional breakfast I had just ranted about, so there was no way we were hanging around. So we made our way next door to a little café and had a small sandwich and chips and hung around until we could board the train. I decided to buy two newspapers (because all we have been doing here when we’re not out and about is watch the news, it’s quite fascinating really, I’m loving having the BBC). Though there were so many papers I had no idea which to chose, so I just grabbed two and they both turned out to be duds and extremely boring to the point of almost putting me to sleep on our train ride.

When we boarded this train we found it not to be quite as nice as our first one, but the seats aren’t bad, we have a huge window still, and our table. We’re stopping at most of the stations we pass along the way, so I think we have upwards of 15 or so until we get to Thurso. We did have one British jerk (I’m telling you, none of them are nice or pleasant!) who joined on a few stops past Inverness. He proceeded to drink three vodka and cokes (ew! Who drinks that really?) in a fairly short period of time and then he fell asleep with his headphones in. And then let the snoring begin. Oh my goodness and the teeth grinding. Doesn’t he know he’s in public and the rest of us don’t want to hear him? Clearly not, so he just stayed there slumped over in his seat and we went right past his stop. It was actually just a bit ago when we stopped that he jerked awake and asked if we had passed his stop. I really had no idea if we had or not, but I knew that the one he said started with an “A” and the one we had passed a few stops back started with an “A” as well. Maybe if he hadn’t been sleeping or snoring or have his headphones in he would have been ok. At the next stop he got off and asked the driver and he was clearly upset and got back on grabbing his stuff and mumbling angrily. The only thing I was able to make out was something along the lines of “mumble mumble….fucking Scotland…mumble mumble”. He left his have drake coke, his empty travel vodka bottles, his boarding pass, and a whole lot of scrap paper and rubbish.

Outside of that this trip has gone quite well! We’re making our way up along the coast and mountains again and it is just beautiful. The best part Jes and I would have to agree is all of the green, the views, and without a doubt the sheep! The sheep and lamb are all over and they are just about the cutest things you have ever seen! I have decided to make it a point to find a lamb and hold it and give it a hug. I may even try to sneak one back to the States with us. They really do have a thing for hills, and so all along the hillside and mountains you will see them just spotted with sheep. When they run it is the funniest and most adorable thing ever. When the train scoots by they get scared and scamper away from the fencing. But for the most part they are just able to roam around and decide where they want to go each day. I’m sure I could go on and on, but the moral of the story is we love sheep!

Now we’re off along the ocean coast and it is beautiful. We just seen some otters not a few minutes ago! Soon we’ll be up in the mountains and to Thurso (where it is the surfing capital of Scotland according to our weapons friend at the kilt shop). It is going to be a beautiful adventure and I can’t wait to get there. Only two more hours by train left!

The end.

The northern adventure: Thuro, Stromness, and Wick @ Thurso, United Kingdom

2010-05-05T19:30:13.000Z

-Thurso-
We arrived to the Thurso train station and had noticed the immediate lack of civilization within eyeshot, if that’s a word. Actually that’s not too fair to say just yet. The main road had shops all up and down it, they were just all closed and nobody was outside. We found our accommodations just down that road. It was definitely a mom and pop kind of arrangement. The owners were running the joint and had some really fun accents, different from that of the south. I’ve got video of it that I’ll post later on. Stan (one of the owners) gave us the keys to our apartment…yes apartment…and sent us on our way. We walked down a few doors to the entrance to the apartment and were welcomed by the 6 flight of stairs that awaited us and our 65+ lbs bags. We dragged them up the stairs, got in to the apartment, and then had our laughs. First, we didn’t even know that they had apartments, we were expecting a hotel. There were some furnishings there but we did end up having to go out and buy a few necessities. They were also kind enough to supply us with 2 very awful looking/feeling pieces of putrid-orange furniture, no phone, no network access, and 3 channels on the TV. The cherry on top was the double bed which is a bit smaller than my American self is used to. (If you haven’t gathered by now, everything in the UK is smaller than in the US.) The shower was kind of warm and very low-pressured per usual. On a positive note, there were a lot of well made windows, a separate room where we kept our stuff, a kitchen (that really had nothing in it) and even a washer/dryer unit (that we couldn’t use because it too wasn’t furnished). We went down to the hotel/apartment managed dinner spot and tried some questionable items from their limited selection which included a weird-glazed lamb shank and some cod that had several bones still in it. We did manage to get wifi access down there which was good news. And things got better when we found “crème de menthe cheesecake” on the menu. I subsequently had that for the remainder my evenings in Thurso. We kind of got quite bored that evening on ended up going to bed as soon as the sun set like a couple of lame asses.

-Stromness-
The next morning we woke up to no power. Jo took a shower in the dark. Fortunately though, since we had all of the windows in the apartment, there was enough natural day light to get our day off to an early start. The plans were to take a day trip up to the northern islands, namely Stromness, and so we found our way to the ferry port and 1.5 hours later, we landed on the island. The island town was scenic but it was incredibly small and about as silent as the grave. We walked the length of the city and couldn’t find anything besides hanging laundry so we decided to creepily watch the school children to walk past us while we stood outside (me with my shoes off…) in front of the ferry port waiting for the next ferry. After we stood outside in the bitter wind for an hour or so, we went back in to the ferry port and watched the news until our ferry came in. I suppose I should justify our uncool actions by mentioning that after being bombarded by BBC news for nearly a week straight, we were feeling frighteningly removed from the world of the news since we had arrived in Thurso. Anyhow, we got on board and made our way back to the ferry port in Scrabster to get back to Thurso. When we got back, we figured we’d check out a recommended local fish shanty called the Captain’s Galley. We walked the quarter mile from the ferry port to the captain’s quarters and didn’t really find much that was appetizing, so we decided just to head back to Thurso and get foodstuffs. The problem was, we then needed to find a taxi. So, we asked some guys at a kiosk to call a taxi for us. To make a longer story short, we tried flagging down our cabby as he drove past us waving back as he headed that quarter mile back to the ferry port terminal. We waited about 5 minutes for him to come back and decided we should walk towards the terminal. As soon as we did, he came back our way and picked us up. We made our way back to Thurso, did the dinner thing back at the Station Hotel, and went to bed as soon as possible, per usual.

-Wick-
The following morning, we headed off by train to Wick, a north eastern city near the coast. We walked in to the city, found a tourist center, and spoke to a salesperson who informed us that the tourist center was “unmanned” and that we could have a look through the brochures and take what we’d like. After asking for recommendations, he did mention a French restaurant and a distillery. We walked the length of the town within an hour and didn’t really find much that was outside of butchers and hand-me-down clothes shops. Though we did end up finding the French restaurant that was recommended to us and so we decided to stop there for a few. The manager was less than pleasant and the server that ended up checking in on us was awkward at best, but what should one expect with a 16 year old bonnie lass? Either way, I had ordered the guinea fowl and Jo got a tomato/mozzarella baguette. To be honest, they were both great, it’s just that it was horribly overpriced. To add insult to injury, my side of vegetables consisted of 6 steamed carrot sticks, 1.5 broccoli florets, and a children’s handful of peas…oh I counted. Anyways, we left and followed a map down to the next recommended stop which was the distillery. We did see a very unpopulated marina on the way through what quickly became the projects of Stromness. We got to the unmarked “distillery” and promptly turned around and headed back to the city. It was so run down, I certainly wouldn’t drink anything that came out of that facility. For real though, I have plans to head to the Oban distillery in the very near future anyhow and I want Jo’s first experience in a distillery to be a decent one. Oban will certainly be the way to make to make that happen. After having a hardly fulfilling meal and walking around the perimeter of the city…twice…we headed back to the train station back at Wick and decided to ask the desk attendant where she would recommend heading to find decent foodstuffs. She recommended the wetherspoon which we had actually passed earlier. When we got there, it was such a nice relief. We may have binged a little. We finished up there and went back to the train station to make way back to Thurso. When we got there, the train was at the station pretty early and the conductor was looking under one of the cars. I asked him whether or not that was the train that was going to Thurso. He responded with, “Going? This train may not be going anywhere.” The end of that short story is that we actually did end up getting back to Thurso without any major issues. We had an early evening on our hands and the “night was still young” so as pompous as it sounds, we went down to the bar for “tea and crumpets” and literally sat there and hung out for maybe 2 hours. During this time, there was a very old couple (70-75 yrs) that came in and pounded the whiskey like it was their job. I got a picture of the old woman going up to the bar and making it happen. It was awesome. Anyhow, we got our crème de menthe pie, Jo finished up with her tea and crumpets, we went up to our apartment for a bit, and decided to go out for one last “night on the town.” We ended up at the “Y-Not” bar and grill which is apparently where all the hip-hoppin’est cats go on a Friday night. Jo was convinced that every young person in the town was there that night, all 16 of them. The pool table, which after watching the news lately may have been a “snooker” table was most definitely made with zebra print fabric, very classy. I had what I will only say was the single best breakfast sandwich I think I’ve ever had. We tried WKD Blue which was very tastey. We called it a night and went back to our apartment for the night. We packed everything up and were ready to leave the next morning. I plugged in the netbook to get a good last charge before our 7+ hour trip south the next morning. As I was wrapping everything up that night, a very loud POP! sounded, the lights shut off, and a little glowing spark flew out of the electrical outlet and on to the floor. I quickly unplugged the netbook and threw it along with my open water bottle down on to the bed and ripped the A/C converter out of the wall. I went to the other room, grabbed Jo’s kindle light and checked everything out. It seems that our A/C adapter shorted the circuit in the entire apartment as nothing was working. Jo soaked up the water from the bed, and I spent the rest of the night freaking out about how my phone had less than 40% charge and the netbook battery was less than 25%. While it gets a good 8-9 hours per charge, that’s surely not going to get us through the next day, let alone the rest of the trip. The next morning, the lights were all able to turn on, but all the power outlets were all still off. Fortunately, we had bought a second replacement A/C adapter in the event something like this would happen. What caused it is still unknown. I noticed that the blades on my netbook had black burn marks on them and my concern then became focused on whether or not my power cord itself was shorted. If it was, we were really in trouble. As you can see, this turned out to not be the case.

Edinburgh, Glasgow: To and fro' @ Glasgow, United Kingdom

2010-05-10T21:04:13.000Z

We got up the next morning and got on the train to head south. When we got to the Inverness layover, I was able to test both A/C adapters and the netbook power cord. As it turned out, just one of the A/C adapters failed but the power cord was still good, thankfully. The train was quite crowded but we did manage to make it in to the Queen Street station in downtown Glasgow. When we got out on to the street, we definitely were walking up the same street that I did with the choir back when we first arrived in Scotland 4 years ago this month. The folk band was even playing right near where they played 4 years ago. The Hector Russell kilt vendor was still there on the left. It was all rather nostalgic. We hiked through the streets and passed herds of people who were gawking at the miles of shopping outlets along the sides of the streets. There was a piper and non-scottish drummer performing “We will rock you” by Queen down the alley. I was disgusted…if for no other reason than the fact that I just heard such disgraceful performance on CD in a gift shop not a few days prior, but I digress. We arrived to the Glasgow Raddison Blu and were so very pleased right from the start. It was perhaps the best Raddison we’ve stayed in yet. It was awfully nice being exposed to and reunited with the type of customer service that we expect in America. I won’t get too detailed in regards to our stay in Glasgow but I will say that while we didn’t really get to experience too much from within the city itself, we did take advantage of the opportunity to take it easy for once and enjoy such a nice hotel. We pretty much hung around and took it easy for that short period of time. The dinners that were served to us were not that enjoyable as usual so we had to make an equally unfruitful run to subway. (Insert meatball rant here.)  left here intentionally. We did however get a comfortable bed (rather two doubles pushed together) and got to watch Family Guy and Britain’s Got Talent for the majority of our time there. During one of our evenings, I decided to try a citrus crème brule with strawberry salad and it may have been the best desert combination that I’ve had in some time. Jo had some nasty dark chocolate tort thing that she rather enjoyed as well. In short, we look forward to coming back to that hotel for the night prior to our departure back to the states. We would recommend it to anyone that was visiting the area.

(Jo takes over for a bit)

I just have to make a quick interjection about the amazing British television that was there! While resting and relaxing our time away, there was of course Britain’s Got Talent, Family Guy (that we were so incredibly excited to find there), there was also Friends (how excited was I?), and then there was this amazing and one of my new favorite shows called Over the Rainbow. It was created by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and apparently he’s done this a few times before with various shows. It’s a musical theater competition show where the girls compete using acting and singing and a bit of dancing (various showtunes and such) and the winner of the show is going to star as Dorothy in London’s West End Theaters production of The Wizard of Oz. It was everything I love about the stage but on TV. The finale is on next Saturday when we’re on our way home from the States, so fingers crossed I can find it online!
So that’s my little Broadway side note. Hooray!

So, we got everything packed up that morning and had room service deliver breakfast to us (it was much more food than we actually asked for, but it was incredible. Surprisingly the best food the hotel had to offer) and then headed out on our journey west towards Oban. Since I am my mother’s daughter, we absolutely had to be there plenty early with loads of time to spare! We picked up our tickets for our journey today and for our return journey back to Glasgow at the end of the week. We found our way to the platform and to our surprise our train to Dalmuir (our one and only train change stop on this trip) was about 20 minutes early. So we boarded the train and were off for the day! We later found out that there is a train from Glasgow to Dalmuir about every 10-15 minutes, so our train wasn’t early, we were just early enough to catch a different train.

Once we arrived at the Dalmuir station (which was unmanned and fairly rundown and all outdoors), we had to play the guessing game as to where our platform was for our train to Oban. Luckily there were only 5 platforms and we were 20 minutes early, so we had plenty of time to figure it out. Once we got there we situated ourselves and began to wait. Then came the first announcement: “We regret to inform you that the 12.42 train from Dalmuir to Oban has been delayed by 5 minutes. Please stay tuned for further updates”. No big deal really (we had no more connecting trains to catch), so we patiently waited. Then a few minutes later the next announcement was made: “We regret to inform you that the 12.42 train from Damuir to Oban has been delayed by 10 minutes. Please stay tuned for further details.” And then just a few minutes later, there was yet another letting us know that it was being delayed for another 15 minutes. So there we wait, hearing all of the announcements for each platform: for example, “The train approaching platform 3 is the 1.03 train to _____, please mind the gap.” They did this for each train that came and went into the station at each platform. Not only that, our train delay announcement came every 5 minutes or so letting us know it was being delayed by 15 minutes. Now after a good hour of sitting around outside waiting for our delayed train, Jes decided we should go find the one guy who worked at the station and ask on the status on the train and how much longer we should be expecting to wait. So I made my way over and asked what was going on. The amusing part of this is that while I was asking him yet another one of our delay announcements was being made. He explained that the train did in fact come, and they were having a problem with their automatic computer program. The program froze up, so the announcement for the train never got made, the delay announcement was going to continue to be made, and the screen would still show that the train was due to come. You have got to be kidding me right? And of course the next train was not due to come for yet another 6 hours.
So after informing Jes of this (he was not pleased with this at all, specifically since this was no error due to us, and a complete failure on their part), we decided to go and talk to the people there and try to figure out the best way to get us West to Oban. Turns out there were no other routes, and our best option was to travel back to Glasgow and catch the 18.30 train. After many phone calls they let us know that they would give us free tickets back to Glasgow, but they couldn’t guarantee us seats on the train to Oban later tonight. This was after waiting an hour for a train that never came, and a half hour of negotiating and phone calls and discussions. Needless to say we were both extremely displeased about this, and we decided that we would be on that train tonight even if we had to stand. They gave us a complaint form to fill out and directed us to our new platform to take us back to Glasgow. Once we were on our new platform waiting for about 10 minutes a man came over and marked on our original tickets that we were to board the later train free of charge or hassle, even if we didn’t have seats.
So back to Glasgow we came! We managed to find a bar, and I went and found the ticket office while Jes ordered us both drinks. Once I explained what happened to the ticket man, he gave us tickets for the later train free of charge and confirmed seats for us.

So here we wait in the Glasgow Queen Street train station, in a bar, eating our lunch and drinking our drinks waiting for the next four hours to pass so that we can spend the next 3.5 hours on our train over to Oban! Fingers crossed and hoping that from here on out we don’t have any problems! Oban here we come….eventually!

A few randoms @ Glasgow, United Kingdom

2010-05-10T22:08:40.000Z

I’ve decided to make a post on just some general thoughts and observations that I’ve made during this little excursion. This may include totally unrelated materials, things I may have left out, or other things that I’m not yet able to define.

NaCl and Tatties: This has been my diet since I’ve come to the UK. Not only has my diet consisted of potatoes, salt, and ketchup, I’ve had it in some form or another every single say since we’ve been here. Oh, I didn’t plan it this way, it’s just happened to be how things have gone. It’s kind of like insurance for dinners around here. When I get something questionable served to me, I can always count on my trusty potatoes. Seriously though, they serve “chips” everywhere you go here, with everything…even breakfast. Again, I’m not making it a point to make this be this way, but I am curious to see if this continues through the last bit of our trip.

Windows: The windows here are so interesting and cleverly constructed. They are typically all engineered to both open outward like a door as well as up at the top only. It’s actually very neat. I wish we did more of that in the states. On a related note, there are never any screens in the windows…probably because there rarely are bugs and such flying around. It’s really quite pleasant.

Dual Faucets: What’s the deal with the dual faucets? I guess I just don’t get it. Many times now, we’ve been exposed to sinks that have a knob and a faucet for each the cold and the hot water and they are located on opposite ends of the sink. The first problem is that you can’t have your hands under both of them at the same time. The second problem is that the cold water one is very cold, and the hot water one is very, very hot. (All the hot water in the UK is extraordinarily hot.) So now, what do you do? The best solution I’ve come to is to burn your hands under the hot water all super quick and the swing your hands over to the cold water and freeze them while you’re trying to wash them. I don’t know.

Some extras from Thurso: When we traveling up to Thurso, I had to notice just how well groomed the fields were. Every field was pristine and untouched, lusciously green, or prepared in a manner that would promote growth of anything that was planted there. It was like a bed of life. On a related side note, we drove past a really neat scene. There was a man who was walking next to his horse in a field. Both the man (with his hands) and the horse (with his mouth) were carrying what seems to be a huge bag of something. How awesome is it when you see man, animals, and nature all working together in such a harmonious manner? It was really nice to see. On an unrelated note, it still blows my mind when we walk past people everywhere who are doing some sort of construction project and you see them down on their hands in knees in there jeans with a hand pick and hammer tearing up the cobblestone road in front of you. This trip has shown many instances of this kind of manual labor which even in harsher environments don’t really equate to that which we have in the US.

Lastly, Jo tried to drug me. There were a few nights in Thurso where I later learned that Jo tried to drug me to make me go to sleep just so she could and I wouldn’t annoy her haha. Little did she (or I) know that Tylenol PM night pills don’t seem to affect me, at all. Granted, I did need them because I was recovering from a nasty cold which she now has, but I could see why she wanted to drug me in the first place…I was in fact pretty annoying. Well she played it off well because the next night, she tried boozing me to sleep. When we were out, she kept asking if I wanted rum. Well, I did but I was a thinker and caught on to her little ploy. Naughty naughty Josef. Oh and on that note, these people have like…no rum…anywhere. Ireland, England, and Scotland all are severely lacking in the rum department. The only thing they ever seem to have is Malibu, which while delish doesn’t really equate to the captain.

Oban, Scotland: The AC Choir and the Coliseum @ Oban, United Kingdom

2010-05-11T15:09:33.000Z

We arrived in Oban via train and within 10 minutes of being in the city, Jo was mentioning just how much she loved it here. The train station virtually shares a road with the ferry port which is just perfect. The bay here is unlike any I’ve seen. Though when we arrived at 10pm, or should I say 22:00, it was definitely getting dark and Jo was getting pretty cold (‘twas around 40 degrees with very cold high winds). The good news is that I’ve been in this turf before (4 years ago) and I had a pretty good sense of orientation within the city which typically isn’t the case. So, we dragged our deadweights/luggage through the city in the general direction of where I was familiar with which of course was the hostel that I had stayed in once upon a time. While I pretended to know exactly where we were going, which I technically did, I made it clear that I had no idea what we were really even looking for. Eventually Jo told me that it was the Oban Bay Hotel which literally happened to be right next door to the hostel that I had previously stayed in and where I assumed the choir was likely to be this time around…assuming we had our dates right.

After checking in, Jo had a nearly endless debate with the hotel keeper about just how we were going to get to our rooms. You see, Jo had discovered that yet again we were on the top floor of the hotel only this time, the staircase was in a very tight circle with very thin landings, like you see in the movies…but with plaid-green carpet. To be fair, it really was quite awful trying to get those stairs with our mobile bedrooms in tow. She just made it much worse than it actually was. So, being the manly one, I picked mine up and blitzed up the stairs to our floor, left mine at our door, went back in to the stairwell, took video of her panting half way up, and then proceeded to help her by carrying hers up for her as well. Of course, this kind of thing went on even afterwards when she couldn’t even pick hers up high enough to get it on the luggage rack in the room. Anyhow, the view is quite lovely here. We have the single best spot in the hotel I’m pretty sure. Out of our window is a direct lookout to the entire bay. It’s so refreshing to be able to see such serenity just outside of your bedroom. That is, until you go to take a shower or flush the toilet, both having just about as much water pressure as a rainy day in Michigan. Actually, that seems to be a problem nearly everywhere, and when you’re a hairy guy like me, that makes for a wastefully long shower. Again with the efficiency...if you upped the water pressure, you’d be out in half the time! Well maybe not half, but surely far less in my case. I digress haha.

The following morning, we moseyed on down to breakfast around 9am or so. All in all it wasn’t too bad. I had some kick ass brown sugar French toast and Jo had some weird looking eggs. Being that we’ve only been in the city since it was dark and our day had barely started, we didn’t really know exactly what we were going to do with the day yet, but we did know that it involved finding the Doc, Tony, and the Alma Choir that evening and hopefully see a performance. So there we were having a lovely breakfast on that lovely morning when Jo proclaimed with great relish, “Hey look! It’s Tony!” Sure enough, out the windows behind me, Tony and his awesome self was wandering by. As it turns out, the choir was apparently staying in the Cathedral which was right next door to our building! (I suppose that would explain why we later discovered a tour bus parked outside of it.) A few moments later, a few maroon fleeces came out of the door carrying luggage with them and shortly behind them was the good doctor himself! We had just got our breakfast served to us but despite the fact that I felt bad, I had to go visit them for at least hot second. We gathered that they were definitely loading up the tour bus and were likely heading elsewhere which if it were true, would make me really sad. I got up and made way for the tour bus. I go around the side of the tour bus and I was greeted with “Jesse Russell? I didn’t expect to see you come around the corner!” I got to see some very familiar faces, which of course include several of my sinfonian brothers and a few other distinct individuals that I was able to spend a short amount of time with during my senior year at Alma. Doc and Pam looked great as always, and everyone was obviously quite happy to be in Oban. During our meeting, I learned that sadly, their performance in Oban was last night when we were busy waiting all day for a second train to Oban. Had they not screwed us out of our original train, we totally would have made the show! Oh I’m still quite pissed about that one. Anyhow, it was pretty neat to find out that we were staying next door to the choir the entire night. I asked Doc where they were headed next and he had mentioned Inverness, which we had just been through a day or two before. He did mention that in about 10 minutes, they were headed to the Oban High School for a quick performance and then they were on their way. What really blew my mind was what happened next. From a short distance, the coach driver said “he might not be able to get in.” As it turns out, it was the exact same coach driver that we had 4 years ago during the second half of our trip! What are the chances really? This was exciting because if for no other reason, for one guy to be in that profession for all those years and still be around to take the choir on their next tour....how awesome. I don’t believe it was Peter, our first coach driver 4 years ago, but if my memory serves me correctly, he has a tattoo on his forearm and I believe it reads “Scotland the Brave.” If so, I’ve got the right guy. Either way, I’m 98% sure. Anyhow, Doc was all awesome as usual and had responded with “well if he’s with us, he’ll get in. ;-)” He then offered to have us join him on the coach and have them drive us there and drop us off in the middle of the city. How awesome is he? I sadly had to decline because we literally got up and went downstairs to do the breakfast thing all quicklike. We certainly couldn’t become presentable in 5 minutes. Hell, it would take us that long to get up the spiral staircase. Though, I did ask if he had an itinerary in the hopes that we could make something work. (Doc did end up bringing us one.) Then, Tony walked by and we enjoyed each other’s company for that short period of time. Pam had had made mention that some of her best and favorite photos of Doc were of ones that I’ve taken on some of our trips together. I’m still flattered that they think so. They were awesome pics though. The one of Doc overlooking the Oban bay is one I will never forget. He introduced me to the choir who were all getting their picture taken in front of the hostel that I once stayed in. Being able to be on the other end watching it happen was pretty awesome. I didn’t want to keep them any longer so I gave them my best wishes and headed back to the breakfast area where I told Jo all about it. We finished up and when we were done, we had seen that the tour bus was backing out of its parking spot so we went back outside to see them off. They all waved as they were travelling by. All of it was really just too awesome. Long live Doc, Pam, Tony, and them Alma College Choir!

Nextly, we decided to head out in to the town and see what we could find. We found 2 amazing restaurants, one Italian and one seafood which were located within 50 feet of the other. We got the times, read the menus, and made plans to visit both that day, one for lunch and one for dinner. We then ran in to a guy that was providing visits to a local seal colony for an hour for about 20 pounds total. We decided that seals are cute and we’d give it a go! So, we gave the dude his money and he recommended that we go to a local café/deli which was within viewing distance of the port and grab a coffee/tea/etc for the trip as it may get cold. We did. We came back and off we went. I won’t get too detailed here about it but we did see some seals doing some pretty cute sealish things. One of them was floating on his back in the water near the shoreline just chillin’. It was awesome.

We did the lunch thing at the Italian place and had some pretty good foodstuffs, though it did end up taking foreverrrrrrr as always. We left there and headed to the Oban Distillery to get one of our tours in. As it turns out, we had just missed that too. We literally walked in as the last tour group was exiting. We found out that the next tour would be the next morning at 10am. We didn’t really know if we could make that or not before we had to leave but we looked in it and later determined that we could make it work. We left there and tried finding our way up to what is technically known as McCaig’s tower but what I shall call a coliseum. We failed. How the hell hard is it get to a giant freaking structure of doom I ask? Well we decided to go to the tourism building and ask so we could figure it out. We were bombarded with information which really was quite nice for a change. Our agent was very informational. She gave us information on everything from their being 144 steps on the path to the tower/coliseum to the contact information to the former wildlife and recreation constable for Mull that would give us tours of the islands. With that, we made way for the tower/coliseum and got there in about 20-30 minutes. It wasn’t as epic as I was expecting but to be fair I think what I was expecting was somewhat unrealistic, so it wasn’t really a disappointment.

After all of that was good and done, we made our way back to the hotel and hung out for a few hours and tried to quickly digest our 2 days worth of backed-up food so we could go and fit in the seafood restaurant and we were so glad that we did. We spent a great deal of time there. While it was very full in the building, we ended up getting some very high quality seafood that was just to perfect to try and describe. It was accompanied by several glasses of wine/champagne and very good desserts. We would recommend it to anyone. That summed up our last evening in Oban. The next morning, off to the Isle of Mull.

Craignure, Isle of Mull: Yeah...about that @ Craignure, United Kingdom

2010-05-11T15:17:46.000Z

Jo here! So yes, come the next morning we were getting ready to head from Oban to the Isle of Mull. We decided to save some time and have breakfast delivered to our room (which was a lovely convenience though the food wasn’t the best) while we were packing and getting ready for our day. We decided that we were going to catch the first tour of the Oban Distillery that morning, so we cleared it with the hotel that we could check out late and leave our bags in our room while we went.

Once we were packed it was off to the distillery, which I have to add makes the morning Oban air smell absolutely incredible! There were more people there than not, which was a bit of a surprise, but we did manage to get into the tour. Our guide was incredible, a very nice old Scottish man (who did not drink beer or whisky we discovered) who was very knowledgeable and fun about everything (and according to Jes much better than the guide he had his first time going through back in the Alma days). My personal favorite part was the distillation chambers. Now being the chemistry and science nerd that I am, I have done MANY a distillation experiment in the lab, and let me tell you, I hated them. They always took forever and EVER and you had such a little yield and you had to hope that your sample was there. I know that’s a ramble, but that’s seriously the daunting thought process that goes through my head when I hear “distillation”. However, this distillation involved alcohol (which, yes, technically I have done before) and it was on a massive scale. These chambers were just incredible. I was so enamored I could hardly pay attention to what he was saying, just going through the whole process, and it was amazing! From there we went through the rest of the tour and got to see the rest of the process and try both a double batch of scotch along with Oban’s signature 14 year single malt. While it was all a bit strong for me first thing in the morning, I still managed to appreciate the taste and finish mine. Jes on the other hand was the tour guide’s guinea pig and got double helpings of it all.

Once we were done with that we hauled ourselves back to the hotel later than planned and had to check out, manage to get our bags down the spiraled staircase (no worries, Jes has video of that amusing moment), and waited for a cab to take us down to the ferry port (we figured it was going to be faster than walking across the town, and since we were pressed for time already it was a good idea). We did have to end up waiting longer than we should have for the taxi, but the driver was friendly and managed to get us to the port right in time to board the ferry to Mull.

Luckily that ferry ride was only about 45 minutes long, so with some reading on my end (love, love, LOVE my Kindle! I just have to throw that in here) and some typing and updating on Jes’s part, we arrived in Mull! The game plan was to walk to our hotel, get lunch, hang out, maybe go on a tour or two (or spa time), and do dinner and have an early night (since we have an early morning tomorrow). Of course things did not go this way.

Once we arrived on Mull it was scenic and pretty, but that was about it. There was one restaurant/gas station (seriously) and a tourist center. We were able to see our hotel about a mile or so in the distance, so we started our first (yes, first of many) long hauls of the day. Once we arrived the woman at the desk informed us that our room wasn’t ready and we should wait in the lounge. While waiting, Jes discovered that the WiFi wasn’t working, so being the tech dude he is he went to resolve this little issue. Turns out it wasn’t such little issue and they weren’t planning on having internet anywhere for at least a week. So we then decided to order a light lunch, and while the lunch was decent, the waitress/bartender was not. I’ll be kind and spare any harsh words, but let me say if we had been in the States I’m sure her day would have ended with tears and being fired after we had talked to her boss about how absolutely horrendous and just awful she was. And to top it all off, after we had been waiting for about 2 hours I decided to ask about our room and the woman responded with “Oh I’m sorry, I must have just forgotten about you, it’s been ready for quite some time”. So in the “quite some time” while we were waiting, we decided that we wanted to throw our stuff in our room and head back on a ferry to Oban for some shopping and dinner and such since there was nothing around. This later turned into our adventure of the day: mission get off of Mull.

Once traveling down two flights of stairs, plus up a set of stairs (no joke, you had to go down stairs, go through a door/hallway, down another flight of stairs, down a hallway, up a set of stairs, and down around some more hallways, and then get to our room), we discovered our just terrible room, incredibly small and just not nice in the least bit, we decided enough was enough. We made a game plan to get back to Oban, book a hotel, come back to Mull, get our things and check out, and then head back to Oban.

I’ll spare you the gory details, but things didn’t quite go the way we had planned. We did make it back to Oban with enough time to buy more ferry tickets, but not enough time to call and book our old hotel (that we have been in the past few nights). So we got back on the ferry and made our way back to Mull. Once there, I found a payphone (and struggled) and tried to get a hold of our hotel in Oban. While I was doing this Jes was making friends with the lovely ladies of the Isle of Mull Craignure Tourism Shop (who I will forever be indebted to). He managed to work out our trip to Iona for tomorrow, and also informed me that they could help us book a hotel. While we did not end up in the one we had been in, we found one just as nice, she gave us discounts, and it was the best experience on Mull we could have had. We then hiked it back to our hotel, informed them that we would be checking out and needed to get our things and would love a ride (in their complementary shuttle) back to the ferry port. Once we were out and waiting to leave for about 30 minutes, we decided to make the hike back (sans shuttle and avec our “bedroom on wheels”) without the “help” of the people at the hotel. All in all, don’t stay on Mull, stay on Oban.
So here I sit, on the ferry yet again (nearing 4 full hours of ferry riding today), typing up this update waiting to arrive back in Oban. Which I do love an incredible amount. I’ve decided that I need to ove to either Edinburgh or Oban. And the next trip to Scotland will be spent mainly between these two incredibly amazingly wonderful cities!

The game plan now however is to get a taxi to our new home for the next two days, find some dinner (can you say deep fried pizza? Because we can!), and have a restful night before we head to the Isle of Iona!

Oban, Scotland: Back to Oban / Queen's Hotel @ Oban, United Kingdom

2010-05-12T20:10:48.000Z

We got off the ferry for the 5th time that day and got our bags and such back down the Oban bay to a hotel that was about 4 places down from our last one in Oban called the Queen’s Hotel. I was kind of skeptical at first when all I knew was the name of it. Here was my thought process for those of you that care. Let’s say I were a hotel owner in Scotland and let’s say my hotel wasn’t exactly a 5 star hotel (by US standards). What I might decide to do is name my hotel something prosperous or otherwise high class so that those who are looking online and the like that hear or see the name of my establishment might assume that my establishment is in fact classy or prosperous. So yeah there ya go. Anyhow, I was a bit skeptical just because we haven’t had the best of luck in the hotel department and with a name like that, I was kind of ehhhh about it. So we dragged out mobile bedrooms back across the bay edge once again, only this time we had to be sure and make a stop a Norie’s. “Why” you might ask. Well I made Jo promise me that she’d try deep fried pizza! I was sad though, I really wanted to her (and I both) to try the deep fried hamburger but we didn’t see it on the menu and we were running out of time to find a joint that had one. I knew they existed though! Danny got one when I got deep fried ‘za 4 years ago! Anyhow, we were waiting for our deep fried ‘za to come out of the fryer (mmmm fresh) and were talkin’ to the guy about things including his trip to the US when I mentioned coming here and not having good luck finding these legendary fried burgers. He quickly responded, “I’ve got em!” I told him that I was kind of confused…I didn’t see them on the menu. He pointed at the hamburger listing on the menu. I was still confused; it didn’t say anything about being fried like the pizza did. He explained that everything there and on the menu was deep fried. Ah ha! “We’ll take one of those too!” In summary, we did get to have them both and while neither of us cared at all for the meat that was used in the burger, we did agree that the ‘za was decent enough. In fact, Jo wanted to go back later on to go get more!

We made our way onward to the Queen’s Hotel and were greeted by a guy that looked fairly similar to that of the male singer in the Italian rock band Lacuna Coil; long stringy brownish hair, skinny, long face, sunken eyes, non-altered European teeth, etc. Sadly, I didn’t get any pictures of him. The plaid green carpet seemed to be a recurring theme amongst the hotels in the area. The lounge / restaurant area seemed to be a nice one. We did find out that yet again, “the internet isn’t working in the rooms at the moment but the lounge has it should you need it.” –Sigh—Well I guess that means I won’t have a lot of opportunity to upload videos or make many updates but I could at least go down and let everyone know that we were still alive. We brought our stuff up to the 3rd floor and while we still had to go up some stairs, they weren’t as awful as some of the other ones and we did get to use a lift on the next floor up, so that was good news. When we got in to the room, everything looked quite nice for the most part. It was a bit smaller but everything that we could really ask for was there and then a little extra. We finally had a shower that had normal water pressure and a toilet that actually flushed! :-D It was so awesome. The best shower that we’ve both had this entire trip. We even got to see family guy that night! Woohoo! The only bad part of the later evening is that I did notice that my left leg big toe was going numb and tingly. It didn’t really go away but it didn’t really get worse. Well what do ya do?

We then decided that it was time to head down to din din at the hotel and try our hand at the exotic menu. We found a seafood platter that came with a number of things we weren’t too familiar with outside of the sea bass and scallops and decided that Jo needed to try it. I found salmon with a bunch of weird stuff all over it so in true Jesse fashion, I got it stripped plain so that it was just a piece of salmon with nothing on or around it. When it came out, it actually looked quite pathetic, particularly when it was compared to Jo’s feast that only a sea captain would have normally been served. The prawns on this thing were massive, eyes still intact, and one of them was even pregnant with little prawnish eggs in underneath its legs which were all definitely on there. It looked quite awful really. Actually, it looked like it definitely belonged in the sea, and definitely not in anybody’s stomach. Well that was all fine but little miss seafood now had to own up to the talk and get busy on those prawns. The problem was that neither of us really knew how to eat ‘em so I asked one of the nice ladies at the hotel, and she had no idea haha. She went to ask one of her colleagues who came out and told us how it was supposed to be done. It was quite simple really, “all you need to do is pull the head off…” and that’s where Jo lost her motivation, as if she’d ever had any haha. Well after you pulled the head off, then you just needed to open up the rest of the body and that’s apparently where you can find the rest of the fleshy bits. Appetizing huh? Yeah, Jo didn’t do too well with any of that and subsequently anything else after that. We wrapped up the dinner stuffs and she decided that we definitely weren’t leaving on that note and that were getting dessert. She had some chocolate tortish thing and I had a delish Crannachan, a traditional Scottish dessert primarily served like a sundae but consisted predominately of cream, oats, and raspberry sauce with raspberry garnishing. It was rather enjoyable and I would surely make it in the states if I knew how. Jo ended up getting one the following night and agreeing entirely with the delish part of this.

We went back up to the room around 9:30-10pm that night and prepared for the day to come which involved a ferrying from Oban to Mull, Mull to Iona, Iona to Staffa, Staffa to Iona, Iona back to Mull, and Mull back to Oban. This will become the longest day that we’ve had and surely the most traveling in one day rivaling that of our trip from Edinburgh to Thurso and Thurso to Glasgow. This would be perhaps the apex / finale to our trip before we head home in a matter of a few days.

Western Adventures: Mull, Iona, Staffa, & Oban (Part I) @ Staffa, United Kingdom

2010-05-13T07:19:17.000Z

Jo taking over for now!

So after our day full of walking and ferry rides we decided that it would be a great idea to get up bright and early and get on another ferry! We were up and out and on a boat by 8am heading for Mull. Once we arrived we managed to find our bus quite easily that would take us over to the other side of the island to Fionaphort (which is where the next ferry was for the next leg of our journey). The bus driver looked like he hated his job, and a few minutes into the ride we knew why. Since Mull is such a small and fairly deserted island, the road to the other end was just one lane, and every now and then you had to swerve off into side bits when another car was approaching. Normally in a small European car this wouldn’t be an issue, but a tour bus is a different story. Luckily we made it there in one piece, and actually the ride wasn’t terrible. The view was of course incredible, and it was relaxing and as calming as could be.

Once we landed in Fionaphort, our goal was to find a boat to take us to Staffa Island. Once we asked around it was determined that none were there, and that we would have to find them on Iona (which was strange and went against everything that we had been told, but oh well I suppose). So onto our next (smaller) ferry we went over to the Isle of Iona. The ride itself only lasted about 5 minutes, so we (and the wind and rain) were over there in no time! Luckily as soon as we left the ferry we found a guy with a boat and asked him about Staffa, and it turned out he was planning a voyage over at noon! This is actually how the conversation went:

Jes: May I ask you a question good sir? (in an almost pirate like accent)
Guy: Aye! (very Scottish like)
Jes: How may we board your vessel? (same pseudo-pirate accent)
Guy: What? (Confused Scottish)
Jes: Um, how do we get on your boat? (Normal Jes voice)
So we decided that we would be joining him to Staffa and until then we would go wondering around Iona until it was sailing time!

The wind on Iona was intense to say the least! It was definitely cooler than we were expecting, and the wind had no problem whipping us all around. We walked through town and made our way to the Abbey the back way, which involved a walk through a sheep pasture, which was quite possibly the best part! We got to come within about 5 feet of both mamma sheep and her sheeplings, and none of them really seemed to mind all that much (they were busy trying to stay warm and eat their grass). There was one mother sheep who we thought at first was crying loudly because she had lost her baby, but as it turned out she was just not happy with us being around! While we loved her and her baby, she did not love us. So through the rain we carried on! I decided that it was just too cold and before we went on our Staffa adventure I should find a hat and possibly some gloves as well. We managed to find a cute little shop where I got a hat and both Jes and I got arm warmers (think leg warmers but for your hands and arms), which were basically gloves without the fingers (so that we could still use our hands for the most part). They were perfect!

After we had seen the town (which did not take long at all), we decided to get a small lunch before we were off to the island. We found the one bar in town and got a small lunch (which really was not all that great, but it served its purpose as a hold-me-over until dinner that evening). From there we joined up with the guy who’s boat we were taking and two girls from Switzerland who would also be joining us. Because of all the wind and rain and the weather being all around against us, the seas were quite rough and choppy. We didn’t think too much of it when we got on, and at first it wasn’t too terrible at all. Once we traveled by boat from Iona to Fionaphort, we docked and picked up probably about another 15 people who would be going to Staffa with us. The whole trip would take about 40 minutes, and so we all crammed into the cabin and were off! At first, all went well; it was a bumpy ride but nothing we couldn’t handle. However, as we got closer and closer to Staffa the seas just got unbearable and our tiny boat was thrown all over the place. And cue our sea-sickness. I started feeling it at first before Jes did, but it did not take long for us both to be cursing our bad lunch and the seas and praying to be on dry land soon. Luckily we weren’t the only ones feeling this way, but that of course is not much consolation when you’re trying not to puke over the edge of a boat in the middle of the Atlantic/Arctic oceans. After what seemed like forever (and like an impossible task), we finally landed on the Isle of Staffa.

Once we managed to get off the boat, we were given two climbing options to take, one was to see the cave and one was to find the allusive puffin birds.

Now, allow me to rant for a moment, because I am apparently the only person to remember very distinctly that the puffin bird went extinct years and years and well, thousands of years ago along with the mammoth and all of those ice age creatures. I very distinctly remember in my elementary school textbooks pages with pictures of the mammoth, the saber-tooth tiger, and of course the puffin. For years I have known them to be extinct, so imagine my surprise when everything on Mull and Iona surrounded these birds! Did they make a comeback that I was not aware of? Do they go against Darwin and the whole evolutionary process? Or did KPS really just have textbooks that were that old and incorrect? Well after listening to me rant about these birds for two days (practically non-stop), Jes decided that we must find them and take a picture of me with them.

So while most everyone who was on our little boat clamored off to the caves, we decided to head up these deadly stairs (what is with Scotland and their piles of rocks as “stairs”?) and ended up on the plateau of the island (dead volcano). Of course we were happy to be on dry land, but now we had to hike across the boggy and mountainous terrain to the furthest northern end of the volcano to find the puffin colony. It took some effort, but luckily there was a bit of a trail to lead us along so we didn’t go falling off the side of the island. We had an hour to find the elusive puffins and make our way back to the ship. Which is easier said than done because while we were hiking we discovered our little boat (and only link back to civilization) was sailing away from the island port where he said they would be! Crisis averted though, I determined that they weren’t leaving us; they simply had to go further out to wait the hour because the seas by the dock were too rough for them to stay there.

...to be continued...

Western Adventures: Mull, Iona, Staffa, & Oban (Part II) @ Glasgow, United Kingdom

2010-05-14T11:25:32.000Z

...continued...

After climbing through bog and mud and up and down many hills and rocks, we found ourselves in the windiest area of Scotland (I determined that, I don’t believe it’s a scientifically proven fact even though it should be), and on the other end of the island. Surprise, surprise: there were no puffins! I’m telling you, this whole “puffin” thing is a huge ploy put on by the Scots. So we were puffin-less, quite windblown and cold, and were retracing our steps back to hopefully make it to the cave in time to (gulp) get back on our boat and head back to Iona (queeze!). Once we got back, people from our boat who had seen the cave let us know that since we had 20 minutes left to get back on the boat we had just enough time to get to the cave and back. So off we set for adventure who-knows-how-many of the day.

Now, let me paint you a little picture until you can see the actual ones. The way to get to the cave involved a walk along a cliff that was situated about halfway up the completely vertical side of this island. Below were rocks and crashing ocean waves. Above were loads of rocks and boulders (that were probably just waiting to fall on us or near us), and what we were to walk on were wet and slippery slabs of slate rock. There was one railing on the inside closest to the island, so of course you were left to fend for yourself on the sea/cliff side. All around, this is just not a safe or sane idea to try and tackle in a limited time frame and weather conditions like we had. So of course, we were off!

We did manage to safely make it to the cave, and it was SO worth that trip! It was absolutely incredible beyond words. Between the rock formations and the color of the ocean and the waves, it was all just about the most amazing site you have ever seen. I would have walked all that way on the cliff and further just to experience it. We had just enough time to take a few pictures and take it in before we needed to rush back to the boat. I really do wish we had more time there, I blame the puffins.

Once we scampered quickly back along the slippy cliff, we got back to the boat at the exact time we were due back, not a minute sooner or later. While we were the last ones to rejoin the group, we were ok with that because it meant we got the seats closest to the door so we could breathe in the fresh sea air while we counted down the minutes until we would be on dry land again. It was in this trip where I got my “sea injury”, which I swore my story would be that a band of pirates found us, boarded our boat and attempted to take us all hostage. I of course fended them all off and blocked them with nothing but my left wrist. What really happened was that both Jes and I were feeling terrible, and I had managed to find the corner seat (which was most stable and best for trying to get rid of the sickness), and Jes was just about to lose his stomach contents so he needed my spot, so I got up to switch places with him. When I was up there was a giant swell and wave that brought us down hard, and my wrist got in between myself and the metal railing. No worries though, it’s just a sprain and the pain helped to keep my mind off of my terrible sea sick stomach. Jes on the other hand didn’t have anything to distract him from the awful sea sickness that neither of us were expecting, so ended up putting himself in this nearly meditative state until the literal moment that we reached Iona at which point, we climbed off the boat with great haste.

Once we got back to Iona we were only another ferry ride, bus ride, ferry ride, and walk before managing to be back in the comfort of our dry and cozy hotel room. The ferry rides were a bit much after our boat experience, and the bus driver this time around was just terrible, but we can’t complain because they got us back in once piece (with our stomachs still intact no thanks to them), and onto the lovely land that is Oban. We decided to walk and get dinner at the seafood restaurant we had gone to the other night, and Jes has some interesting observations and thoughts on the owner/girls who work there that I’m sure he’ll have to go into during one of his random ramblings. The food was quite lovely again, and we were seated next to two Frenchmen, so I got the opportunity to hear some French and listen in on their (incredibly boring and dull) conversation. We them walked back to our hotel where we spent some quality time in the lounge. I got to have some lovely evening tea (I might secretly miss this about being in the UK) and read while Jes got some uploading time in with the awesome internet speeds(compared to what we have had throughout the trip), and we called it a somewhat early night with some Family Guy!

The finale: Last morning in Oban / Last day in Glasgow @ Glasgow, United Kingdom

2010-05-15T09:55:57.000Z

I got up around 9am or so and got myself and all of my stuff ready to check out. Jo was still sleeping and was going to take far longer, so for all of your viewing pleasure, I went on down to the lobby once again to get my upload on before we had to check out at 11am. Jo ended up coming down around 10:40am and hung out with me for a bit whilst I was finishing up. We dragged our excess baggage around with us (as always) and made our way for the local bakery/deli/café place (Kronks) so we could find something, anything for sustenance before we crammed ourselves on to what was very likely to be a very full 3.5 hour long train ride from Oban to Glasgow. We got our respective breakfasts/lunches to go and headed to the train station where it was waiting. Since we had reserved tickets, I had to kick some wench out of our seats which of course was no problem. After we took our forward facing table seats, a middle aged English couple sat down opposite us. Fortunately, they were pleasant enough. I was lucky enough to get the 5’4’’ 140lbs woman sitting across from me while Jo got to deal with long legs mcgee the whole way. Again, they were pleasant and all, we could have had and have had far worse table neighbors, it just kind of sucked because we were going to be miserable the entire way due to lack of moving or adjustment. Anyhow, we went about our lunchstuffs and as usual Jo wasn’t 5 minutes in to hers without having it spill all down the front of her nice white top that I’m pretty sure she bought for this trip. The lady across from me gave her a wimpy used napkin, then she decided to go pull another top out of her suitcase at the front of the train, which she did. It was actually kind of amusing. When she initially spilled it, we were discussing using the tide stick, which I quickly shot down due to the size of this thing. When she came back from changing her top, the man across from her made some comment like “wow, that tidestick sure did the trick!” I got a good laugh from that one. From there, we kind of all did our own things from then until we got there. I was taking video/photos and naming and sorting videos while triptracker composing, Jo was being pompous with her Kindle, the lady was reading a book, and the man was looking through celebrity magazines, a very unmanly thing to do I might add.

We got off the train and found ourselves a cab and not just any cab, it damn near was the cash cab! It was all huge inside, so huge that we were able to walk in to the seating area and drag our bedrooms with us inside. It was pretty awesome. I was waiting for the lights to turn on in the ceiling and have some sort of bells go off or something, but alas, no such luck. He brought us to the Raddison in downtown Glasgow where we were only a few days ago and in we went. We checked in, headed up to the room and I promptly started uploading because the connection there was allowing for a whopping 20kbps upload -_-. Jo called downstairs to see if she could get in to the spa area within the last few hours but she also had no such luck. We took it easy for that last bit of time in such a nice place. We later went out in search of foodstuffs since the hotel’s sucked quite bad. We ended up with a feast compromised of asian food from Chopstix, and pizza/garlic balls from a local pizza joint and the restaurants citrus crème brule. I felt like hell afterwards and most definitely this morning. It was like that time we went and binged on steak n shake at like 3am on that one weekend retreat. What a bad choice the day before 10 hours of traveling.

We got up bright and early this morning starting around 5:30am or so and grabbed a taxi to get us back to the Glasgow Airport. We got there in good time and made it through everything including security in a matter of minutes. While the walk along the building was quite long, when we got to the gate, we pretty much sat around for 45 minutes or so until our plane arrived. Confusedly, I was led outside and then was directed to walk in the general direction of the plane. This little puddle jumper was so miniscule that it didn’t even merit a loading causeway like all the rest of the planes. I got a laugh out of that one and then proceeded to record it. We ended up going up the little plane stairs like the freaking president. It was amusing to me. We were in row 4 which was awesome because we were up near the super front, or so I thought. As it turns out, the “aircraft” was so small that row 4 sat right in front of the propellers. It was deafeningly loud. Fortunately, the noise ceased when we reached 10,000 feet. We got to Dublin, Ireland in a brisk 60 minutes and then we had the pleasure of going through about 5 security checks and 2 customs checks (one of which was for the USA???) before we were admitted in to the vat held our flight to Chicago and another delayed flight to Philadelphia where I was in fact not born and raised. And in this melting pot of sickness, “culture,” children, angst, and odor, we waited for about 2 hours. The good news is that we were in row 10 this time on the airbus 747 which if you know anything about 747’s, they’re huge and this would mean that we’re right up front behind the business class. We wait until the very end of the line at the gate, and decide to jump in line. We peep over the shoulder of the girls in front of us and we see that they belong in row 40. We were like ughhhhhhh. They call people up from the back of the plane to the front for a reason. Anyhow, we get on and mosey up to our seats which were surprisingly in front of the lavatory for once…DIRECTLY in front of it –sigh--. This also meant that we couldn’t lean our seats back –sigh again--. The good news though is that I didn’t have to deal with anyone behind me and even more surprising was the fact that we couldn’t really hear the very loud toilet flush the 100+ times throughout the trip! BUT. Join me on my rant for a bit. On the way here, I had the pleasure of sitting behind someone who decided to keep her seat leaning back the ENTIRE time we were in flight, all 7 hours of it. She damn near broke the netbook when she dropped it back all super fast. If it had been my macbook pro, someone’s ass would have been dealing with me the whole trip. Well fast forward to this very moment. There are two rows total between the 1st class section and the galley/lavatory where we are placed. The back row where we are located can’t lean back and the front row has about 3-4 feet of leg room. Well here I am again, sitting behind the ONLY person in the entire section who has decided to keep her seat back 100% of the trip. This bitch has been up there reading for some time now. I’m glad she’s comfortable. She seriously is the only person out of (--counts--) 16 people who has her shit back and has had it back the entire time and her ass is sitting right in front me of. Oh my God. Whyyyyyyyy is it always me?! Next up, I will not get in to any of this here but there is another person here who has been extraordinarily resemblant to that of someone at work. Welcome back. Oh, and I ran over a child today.

Welp, we’re about to start the decent to the Chicago airport so I shall end this post here. I expect I’ll make one more as catch-all / wrap-up post within the next few days.