Category: Europe

So, after being in Scotland for three days, we really have a feel for the place.  Obviously, this is a place where the weather is always warm and sunny—just like the Pacific Northwest!  Today it was actually hot, in the low eighties (28 C).

The past two days we toured the Loch Lomand and The Trossachs National Park.  Yesterday we drove the Trossachs Trail, and today around Loch Lomand.  With the gorgeous weather, it was a little busy on the roads.  Some roadside pullouts were full, even on a Monday.  But the scenery is what we expected: Beautiful!

At one point we stopped at a little roadside park near a waterfall (Falls at Falloch).  At the bottom of the waterfall was a swimming hole.  There were young people climbing to the top of the rocks and jumping down, having a lot of fun.  I could not help but think that in the U.S. access to those rocks would have been blocked “for your safety”, or more accurately, to protect the park service from lawsuits by stupid people.

My only negative comment so far: Scots are litterbugs, but enough said.

The Scots like to have fun, maybe a bit rowdy now and then.  They are also very hospitable and accommodating.  The first night in the country was a Saturday night and we had trouble finding a place to eat; every place was completely filled for the night.  There was one little spartan hole-in-the-wall Italian place in Doune.  It did not look like much from the outside, and we would never have gone there, but our lodging hosts recommended it.  It was also full, but one kind couple dining there overheard our plight and volunteered to vacate their table fifteen minutes before kitchen closing time so we could have something to eat.

We have noticed that in England and Scotland, if you are patient and not pushy, they will often come up with something.  Not only were the restaurant owners hospitable, but their food compared favorably to most big city Italian restaurants.  They had their own homemade bread and doctored their oil and balsamic vinegar with honey and herbs, and it was delicious!  The Chianti was very good and very reasonably priced (like everything else).  And that was even before the meal came!

We love our little garden studio, so we decided to stay an extra night, until Friday.  We can eat in the little Italian place one more time.

Arjan has done it again! He found us a marvelous place to stay for the next five days in Scotland—a bungalow called “The Garden Studio” in Doune, Stirlingshire, about halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Doune (pronounced “dune”) is a tiny town, most famous for its medieval Doune Castle.

We are centrally located near Stirling (site of another famous castle) and the Trossachs National Park, which includes Loch Lomand. (More about those places when we have actually visited them!)

In the meantime, I want to praise our lodgings. The owners, Fiona and Colin Graham, have set up the little cottage perfectly. It is very cozy and beautifully arranged, and everything we might need has already been thought of.  The little house is tucked behind their house, at the end of a driveway you couldn’t find unless you knew it was here.  We have the ultimate in privacy and convenience, and a wonderful place to relax and stay put for a while.

Outside our windows is an old stone fence and rolling green farmlands, with mountains that appear out of nowhere in the afternoon sun. Speaking of sunshine, we have had two days of cloudless skies and temperatures in the 70s Farenheit (above 21 degrees Celsius). Hard to believe that we have brought our travel weather gods with us once again. Even if it turns cloudy or even rainy over the next few days, we have been blessed with absolutely perfect weather to get settled into our little haven.

Today, we took a long time to get started, enjoying the precious sunshine on our porch and streaming in through the windows.  We finally dragged ourselves away to go sightseeing around 3:00 PM.  Luckily, the sun doesn’t go down until around 10:00 PM, so we had plenty of sunshine to drive a portion of the Trossachs Trail, a scenic loop around the National Park, and take a walk near Loch Katrine.

Dinner will be at the Lion & Unicorn in Thornhill, a nearby pub that sent us away last night because they were mobbed. Last night, we ended up eating at L’Angolino’s in Doune just before closing. Every other place we tried turned us away! While waiting for our table, we took a stroll around the neighborhood and actually stumbled across Doune Castle after the tourists had all gone home for the night.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

After the train trip and an evening in Edinburgh (described by P.J.), this morning it was time to get the rental car and drive to the countryside.  The line at the rental place was an hour long, but I finally got the car, a Fiat 500 Diesel.  It does well over 50 mpg on the highway.  The Scots (and the Italians) are frugal!

Then the fun started.  The distance from the car rental place to the hotel, where I was to pick up P.J. with our luggage, was only a 3-minute walk up the city stairs P.J. described in her blog.  But with all the complicated one-way streets, I could not figure out how to get there.  I turned on Google Navigator and found out it was a 6-minute drive!  When I had to make a crucial turn, I missed it.  Then all of a sudden it was a 10-minute drive!

Anyway, after I picked up P.J., we had to drive out of Edinburgh, and I do not know how we could have accomplished that in the old days without Navigator.  The road out of town was full of roundabouts.  You barely went through one before the woman Navigator voice began giving instructions for the next roundabout.  The phone was chattering at me almost constantly.  Some of those roundabouts had five or six roads coming into them.  So, when she said, “Take the fourth exit,” I had to start counting.  I had the feeling I was on a roulette wheel, hoping I would drop into the right slot.  P.J. likened it to being in a pinball machine.

Anyway, we did miss a few turns, but after whirling and swirling westward through the Edinburgh suburbs, we finally got on the motorway, which was much simpler.  I have to admit my aging brain did not have enough parallel processors to concentrate on driving on the left (most important), following the incessant Navigator directions (second most important), and talking to P.J about other things (not important), so I got a little testy.

Now we have arrived at our place in the Scottish countryside where we will be for the next five days.  The weather has turned beautifully sunny and pleasantly warm.  All we hear is the breeze and the birds.  Aaahhh!

Today’s job was traveling from London to Edinburgh by train.

The transfer from the hotel to King’s Cross station and onto the train was pretty smooth. But just before the train left, in comes a family of four, two adults and two small children (ages four and two), to occupy the seats across the table from us designed for two people. We were riding backwards facing them. The family was from Argentina (the husband originally from Australia). They turned out to be very nice, except for the usual noise children make and the little girl kicking me whenever she was sitting on her father’s lap. The children were entirely bilingual in both Spanish and English, and extremely charming.

The parents felt a bit guilty, so they made it up to us by lending me a converter for my laptop cord and giving us the free Wi-Fi codes they had obtained good for the entire trip.  (Standard fares are usually limited to only 15 minutes of free Wi-Fi.)

I must admit that I was so distracted by all the activity across the table that I did not pay as much attention to the scenery as I wanted to.  Around York, we passed a lot of neat, green farmland a lot like Holland and Belgium.  Later we passed the gorgeous town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, on the shores of the North Sea, and lots of castle ruins.

Edinburgh is a revelation.  The immediate impression is of massive amounts of brown stone and towering heights.  The history of the place is vividly evident everywhere, and I want to spend a lot more time here exploring the place and taking photographs.  The shortest way out of the train station to where we were staying is a most intimidating stairway that climbs straight up and up.  Instead, we dragged our bags the long way around the corner and up the incline onto Cockburn Street.

Our hotel is a huge improvement over the previous two nights—totally modern and much larger, but inside a building as old as the rest of the city. After spending some time settling in and recuperating from the sense of always being on the move, we hiked up to the next corner and the famous Royal Mile, the wide boulevard that climbs still higher to the imposing Edinburgh Castle at the top, checking out restaurants along the way.  Somehow the buildings retain their sense of history despite the modern-day tourism at their feet. There are churches and statues everywhere, along with taverns and pubs, stores selling argyle and tweed, street musicians, bagpipes, tour groups, and rowdies yelling to each other down the street.

So with all the choices of places to eat, do we go with Scottish fare or choose something more familiar?  We will be in Scotland for another ten days or so, so we chose Gordon’s Trattoria, for traditional Italian food and a most charming Scottish waiter who really knows how to charm the tourists.

I love this city. It is really unique among the cities we have visited, and I can’t wait to come back to experience it some more.  We leave tomorrow for our Scottish rental, but we have some unplanned time in Scotland, so we just have to come back.

Photograph © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Since I work in the field of web accessibility, I am constantly aware of accessibility issues, online or otherwise.  My experiences before my knee surgery also made me much more aware when there is a lack of accommodation.  Traveling around a city with two rolling bags behind me this time reminds me to recognize all the places it might be hard for people to access who have special needs—and that includes people with suitcases, strollers, or kids.

Unfortunately, the London Underground has a long way to go.  First of all, there are long escalators and flights of stairs everywhere to bring you deep down to the bomb-proof level of the tube trains, with no elevators in sight. And long circuitous routes between the platforms for various directions and train changes. But the biggest problem is that there is the ever-present “gap” between the trains and the edge of the platform.  Sometimes it is only a small gap of a couple of inches, but sometimes, in stations that have a curve, the gap can be more than a foot to jump over.  Not only that, there is often a big step down from the train to the platform.

The percentage of accessible stations is much smaller than in Boston. The tube maps even have to differentiate between accessible stations that provide full access from the train to the street, and those that are only accessible from the platform to the street.  What good does that do?

Navigating with suitcases reminds me of the troubles someone using a scooter or a wheelchair might experience. The paddles that close behind you at the ticket machines actually caught my suitcase at one point, and a station guard had to come along with a key to release me.

Our hotel was also ridiculous, with tiny, narrow staircases up and down levels that you can’t even negotiate with a large suitcase, much less with a mobility impairment of any kind.  And no handrails or ramps anywhere. Our room was so tiny, there was no place I could stand where I could not touch the wall!

Let’s not even mention London’s famous double-decker buses, as beautiful as they are. In Boston, the buses can “kneel” for senior citizens and people who need special help.

Boston is doing much better.  Probably to do with the Americans with Disabilities Act. There is much more thought and much more accommodation for various abilities than in the ancient city of London.

It was cloudy, breezy, and in the fifties.  But strangely, I enjoyed that, and P.J did too.  Excellent walking weather.  P.J could not have done this much walking two years ago before her knee operation.

We bought a London public transport day pass.  First we went to Selfridge’s, looked at the overpriced merchandise, and instead just had some tea outside on their roof garden.

We walked along Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes never existed. On to Madame Tussaud’s where the long lines and the high admission prices made us pass it up.  We walked through Regent’s Park, very enjoyable, and had lunch there.  We hopped on a double-decker bus, hopped out again, and like commuters rushed ahead to catch the connecting bus in front of us. This way we gave ourselves a rush-hour tour of central London from high atop a city bus.  We wrapped up the day walking around Westminster Abbey and Parliament buildings, and then had a wonderful dinner at Savoir Faire, a French restaurant.

Random impressions: In London, they really don’t want cars.  Discounted parking near the London Zoo was $50 a day— without the discount, $75.  The tube is even busier than the New York subway, where we were just 11 days earlier.  On the busy Piccadilly line, trains are only one or two minutes apart.  On the endless escalators, stand on the right and don’t block the left.  P.J made the mistake of putting her suitcase on her left and people berated her for it.  But otherwise, Londoners are extremely helpful.  When it was obvious we were trying to figure something out, multiple times people came up and volunteered helpful information.  Much friendlier than Paris, New York, or Boston.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

The British are sooo articulate.  They don’t have Baggage Claim but “Baggage Reclaim”.  Much better!  “Baggage Claim” sounds like you can take any bag you want as long as you have a good lawyer.

After weeks of agonizing about how to pack for a 50-day trip involving plane, train, bus, rental car, and cruise travel, we have finally arrived in London. We are staying in a small hotel near King’s Cross and St. Pancras station.

Today’s trip went amazingly well. Despite dire predictions about long delays at TSA security, we breezed through without a line.  The British Airways flight was smooth, and we even arrived a bit early.  Good thing, though, because it took quite a bit of time to get through customs. There were both European and non-European lines. Arjan’s line was much longer, but he got through much faster. My line got stalled until they called in extra help and increased the open lines from four to about a dozen.

The new Heathrow Terminal 5 is really beautiful, and we had no trouble taking the Underground to get to central London.

We don’t have jet lag, thanks to a daytime flight, but we are both very tired from a poor night’s sleep anticipating our trip.  Now that we are here, can we relax yet?

Photograph © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.