Knittinggarden

Continuing with the Edinburgh portion of the trip, we booked an all day bus trip to the ancient golf course of St. Andrews and through the fishing villages of Fife. It was a rainy day so we thought a bus tour would be good.  We started out by traversing Edinburgh to pick up all the other passengers. I was glad that we weren't driving! Rain, narrow streets, construction... and driving on the left.  We headed out of town and stopped to photograph the new Queensferry bridge. It was opened in August (by the Queen!) and is the longest suspension bridge in the world and Britain's tallest. Unfortunately, the weather was still misty and we couldn't get a clear view across it.  The excitement here, at least for me, was locking myself into a toilet stall during our brief stop here. My motto, "never pass up a restroom," could have spelled disaster. Luckily I had my backpack with me with a nail clipper inside and I was able to MacGyver the lock open with the file part.  The n...

I am pretty far behind in documenting the parts of our journey, so this entry, while being about our stay in Edinburgh from Sept. 23-27, is being written Oct. 4. And today is 9 months post surgery and the report is that we're all doing well. Good news! So, back to the trip. We got off the train at Waverly Station in Edinburgh and took a cab to our guest house, which was situated about a mile from the city center. We went for a walk and ended up at the National Museum of Scotland. This was one of our favorite places so far. It's immense in size and has all manner of exhibits. Even without paying to see the main historical exhibit on Bonnie Prince Charlie, we filled a couple of hours wandering around and looking at everything from technology, medical equipment development, transportation (there are small airplanes and a full size locomotive in there) and finally natural history which included models of dinosaur skeletons. A fascinating place that you could easily spend a day in. ...

After Iceland, we flew to Glasgow to start the main portion of the trip. We had intended to spend two nights in Glasgow and take a day trip into the western highlands but I messed up the dates and we only had one day there. We took a cab from the airport and the driver kindly gave us an overview of driving in Britain. This would prove helpful later. 😊.  We were able to check into our hotel early and then headed out for food and to do a hop on hop off bus tour. Buying the tickets online proved to be a mistake since the bus company needed a printed copy and we wasted a bunch of time finding a way to print them. But once we got going, we got a nice overview of the city without much trouble.  Glasgow is a pretty big city with a lot of interesting architecture. It was very walking friendly and pretty easy to find our way around in. Our hotel was right next to the Central train station which made getting to Edinburgh the next day an easy prospect.  We came across a women's dre...