Europe fall 2018

We spent our last Scotland days in Edinburgh.  Edinburgh was thronged with tourists and locals alike, all of whom seemed to be out drinking on Saturday night.  It was quite a shock after the isolation of the West but we managed to entertain ourselves with visits to the Castle  and through the old streets and narrow passageways (called 'Wyndes') of the medieval city. This little lane was the route to our hotel - there are many, many, many steps where we had to haul our luggage. Scotland exceeded my expectations.  It has a wild beauty that I didn't expect to find anywhere in Europe, along with welcoming and wryly funny people - people also very unlikely to think too highly of themselves.... certainly not claiming to be the best ... We departed Edinburgh for Dublin, where we were hosted in grand style by Sile's brother Frank and his wife Janet, visiting family young and old alike before flying to Athens.  Here's our laundry dryi...

Unlike Skye, there is no bridge to Mull and one gets there via one of three ferry routes.  Due to the all-day storm and its heavy rain and gusty winds, the main ferry was cancelled (or "disrupted" as the Scots say) and we had to finagle an alternate route over some back roads to get to the alternate.  See Jim's previous post about driving, and then add stormy conditions and improvised route - rest assured that both driver and passenger were glad when we arrived at our hotel around 5pm that afternoon. A whiskey by the fireside in the drawing room did a lot to soothe frayed nerves. To call this hotel 'remote' would be an understatement.  We passed no towns, stores, restaurants or commercial establishments of any kind (and perhaps two houses) in the hour's drive leading to the hotel.  Fortunately a tasty breakfast and dinner were available and our fellow guests (from England and northern Ireland) -- stranded since the ferry to take them on to a further is...

Thoughts on driving in Great Britain We have now logged several hundred miles in England and Scotland and have a few insights/warnings to share. They drive on the left.  Turns out this is the least troublesome aspect of driving here, though entering and exiting the roundabouts can be exciting. The English drive fast on the motorways.  I really don't know if there is a speed limit because I never saw one posted.  Neither, by the way, did I ever see a police vehicle on the motorway.  We drove 75-80 miles an hour in the middle lane of a 3-lane motorway and were routinely being passed on the right. The roads in the cities are narrow  and people routinely block 1/3 of the road by parking, legally or otherwise.  Driving in some of the Cornish towns reminded me of a combination of chicken and a bi-directional slalom race.  We have driven, as you know, several Priuses since 2014.  Our first car, in England, was a Prius and it seemed so wid...

Before we left Cornwall, we decided to visit St. Michael's Mount, just off the coast from Marazion, where we were staying. St. Michael's is a little sister in the abbey world to the more-famous Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy.  Same deal -- abbey on an island just off the coast with a pedestrian causeway that is submerged by the sea about half of every day.  The island was given to the Benedictine monks in the 1067 by King William ("The Conqueror" guy) as a reward for their backing him in the famous battle of 1066.  The abbey was/is much smaller than its famous kin in France and was converted to a private residence in the 1400's.  The same family has owned the castle for some 350 years, though today they live in a very small part of the building and let the tourist throngs roam through the rest. Various English lords, dukes, knights, and kings fought for the Mount over the centuries.  These guns dated from the 1500's but we also saw pillboxes a...

Bath is a UNESCO World Heritage Site renowned for its architecture, both current and ancient.  The town is full of Georgian buildings built in developments such as  The Royal Crescent and The Circus The Romans also settled here in ancient times to construct a bath and temple on the site of the hot springs (only hot springs in the British Isles, apparently).  The Brits, as usual, have done an exceptional job with the preservation and museum for these Roman Baths and it was a fascinating tour. One of the highlights of our couple of days in Bath was our visit to the laundrette.  Google suggested one called "Dolly Tubs" - and with a name like that, who could pass it up.  Parking was a bit fraught (as it has been everywhere in Britain) but the laundrette itself was perfect - clean and inexpensive.  The people there - the proprietor and several of the patrons - were capti...

Sunday was a busy day.  Forewarned by Rick Steeves about the ticket queues at the Churchill War Rooms and the Tower of London, we bought tickets online Saturday morning.  Using the still-amazing London underground, we zipped from our apartment in St. John's Wood to Westminster in about 20 minutes and got in line to enter the Churchill War Rooms and Churchill Museum. Neither of us expected to be so interested in the War Rooms.  In fact, we were there for 2 hours and could have stayed longer had museum fatigue not set in.  The Rooms are in a bunker below Whitehall in central London.  At one point there were 500 people working there, assisting Churchill and the heads of the military branches as they ran the British World War II campaign.  People lived and worked underground for weeks at a time.  Though the bunker was directly below a major government building, it was never damaged during the blitz. The exhibits included a giant map room where all ...

This trip is a lot different from our last long vacation.  Then (2009) we were going mainly to warm places and we managed to pack everything we needed into two roll-on bags.  This time, we're visiting Scotland in October and Paris in November.  We needed two big bags to contain all the warm layers, walking shoes, rain pants, and so on. And... "and so on" included nice(r) pants and shoes, since we knew we were going to the theatre in London.  Which lead, to my complete amazement, to Ralph's polishing his shoes.  Some of you might think, based on long observation, that neither of us owns a pair of leather shoes.  Wrong!  We can get gussied up when we have to.  But nothing in my experience prepared me for the sight of Ralph polishing his long-neglected black shoes.  I don't expect to ever see it again. Tom and Mark were kind enough to drop us at the Santa Rosa Airport, where we got the bus to SFO and our 7:30 pm flight to London....