In the beginning...

Thursday evening, May 10

What busy little bees we have been!

We left the unfriendly confines of the USSRA on Tuesday morning via American Airlines to London, choosing a mid-morning flight, which turned out to be lovely. JFK wasn’t crowded, nor was Heathrow. Win/win.  

As you may know, I am a very fearful flyer, but I was lucky to be on a smooth flight, and even luckier to have read some helpful advice while I was on the plane. Yes, it might have been smart to look for advice prior to boarding, but I hate to be early for anything. 

Anyway, I read that all of the things I’ve tried to do in terms of relaxation exercises are not productive when you’re actually on the plane. Those exercises help you when you’re in a calm, quiet space. But when the plane is making noise and bouncing, the exercises fail because you feel out of control and all of your stress hormones start to kick in. 

The advice was to actually pay attention to the things that scare me and remind myself that I’ve survived each incident, and use each to build a mastery experience. I’m not sure it would have worked if the flight had been rough, but it worked brilliantly for this one. Hurrah!

We stayed in a hotel in Terminal 4, managing to sleep a bit. In addition to my fear of flying, I also usually have terrible jet lag. Don’t you wish you were married to me? I’m a veritable font of joy!

Anyway, I did okay, even with only about four hours of sleep. I think the morning flight that got us to London same day (10 pm) helped a lot. Among Carolyn’s long list of superior genes is the ability to tell herself it’s any time at all and be on that new time with no bother, so she got her full eight hours.

The exciting part of the day occurred when we were boarding our train to Scotland and Carolyn realized her backpack was missing. Since it had her computer and all sorts of other goodies in it, it was kind of vital that we try to recover it.

She recalled she’d taken it off on the tube from Heathrow, and had forgotten it on the seat. After freaking out for a few minutes, we decided to call AMEX and see if they could help us decide what to do. Carolyn checked her email for no reason at all, finding a note from the station manager at Holborn, telling her someone had turned it in.

The funny part (not funny at all!) is that they had to stop the whole train line because of unattended luggage. I bet the passengers laughed and laughed.

If this had happened in Nueva York, the cops would have blown it up, then interrogated Carolyn for a few hours before they let her go. The FBI probably would have gotten involved as well. But they are decidedly chill in London, even though they have more frequent problems. 

The station manager just opened it up, looked through all of the stuff, and found Carolyn’s email address. The woman reported that one of the first things she saw was the boarding pass from the flight, so she assumed it was just a spacey tourist who’d had too many things to keep track of. What a rational response! The whole shebang only took about an hour and a half, and could have been much, much worse.  

After calming down, we took a Virgin train to Glasgow, pulling into Central Station around six p.m. We’d gotten a delicious, super-filling sausage roll in Euston Station at Paul Hollywood’s stall, so we were able to skip dinner, sustaining ourselves with a beer that you could have eaten with a fork. It grew on you, but it was super hearty!

Our Glasgow rental is right on the Clyde, and has marvelous views. We didn’t realize that we’d hear trains rumbling through, and drunks partying at the river all friggin’ night, but other than the noise it’s a nice place. Top floor of a condo building, seen here above where the drunks were smashing bottles in the wee hours.

Our unit is the top floor green glass apt.

We woke at four thirty, and spent a half hour trying to find any place we could get coffee. From our study, it seems you can go to the train station and have a Starbucks at five thirty. For anything else you have to wait until seven thirty. Glaswegians don’t seem to be early risers.

Carolyn had made reservations in Oban for the night, trying to get me to Iona, one of the places I was really jonesing to see. 

I’ll save your having to read about the intermediate steps we took to achieve this, but suffice it to say that we weren’t able to visit the Oban distillery, nor get to Iona today, even though we were very close. 

To reach Iona you have to take a big ferry to Mull, then a bus all the way across Mull. Next is a tiny ferry that covers a very short distance to Iona. But since the boat is tiny, it doesn’t sail if the wind is strong or the waves are high. We were too late to go today, since they’ve got some wacky bus schedule that makes you leave Iona at three, so we were going to do it tomorrow. But they posted a yellow flag warning that they don’t expect to lift, prohibiting the little ferry from crossing.  

We were going to stay over and see if the warning was lifted, but the locals didn’t seem hopeful.

Rather than wait around not seeing things, we took the big ferry to Mull, just to have something to do. It was a nice ride, so we stayed on it for the return rather than disembark. 

I’m sure Mull could be a lovely place to stay, but it was raining by then and we didn’t want to take another hour-long bus trip just to see some gaily colored businesses, which seemed to be the main attraction. 

Once back on Oban, we raced from the ferry to the train, and made it with moments to spare. Normally, I’d be cranky to have been on a local train for over seven hours, but the scenery was so spectacular that I wouldn’t have minded if it had been longer.

Mountains, hills, craggy rocks perched just above the train tracks, pine forests nearly touching the cars, and long lakes providing a tranquilizing peacefulness. Meadows filled with jonquils, gorse flowering everywhere in a vivid gold, and normal specimen trees flowering in the gardens of the homes of the many, many stops we made.  Sheep, hundreds of baby lambs, goats, cows and horses everywhere you looked. On our previous trip I was always looking for livestock, and I found it today!

So even though we took a very long train ride to nowhere, and spent 70 pounds for our troubles, we had a lovely time. 

We have pretty good internet on our phones, and I found an Indian restaurant that got good reviews just two blocks from the train station in Glasgow. It was super!

Now we’re back in our penthouse, trying to stay awake until it gets dark, which is around ten o’clock.

We have no firm plans for tomorrow, which means museums. Can’t wait to dig into some Rennie Mackintosh!

Cheers!

SXM and CDN