Another Year Gone By

Of course I wasn't finished. Did y'all think I was done? Oh no. Oh no, no, no, no, NO!

I'm planning a new adventure to Australia! The other side of the world from Scotland!!! So ridiculously excited. If you're interested in reading about it, head on over to my new blog called Enterprising Expeditions. Right now, it's all about the time and planning leading up to my leaving. There are quite a few posts, but I also need a bit of help.

Y'all know how I counted "kilts checked" at the bottom of each post on THIS blog, well now I need a new idea for Australia. Something silly. If you have ideas, comment on that new blog and let me know!

Thanks for sticking with me and make sure you travel whenever you get the chance!

Kate

I Guess That Wasn't the End

I just spent a few hours reading through ALL of the past posts. Yes, all of them. And do you know what? I'm planning more adventures! But upon reading those posts and planning these new adventures, I realized some tips for you new adventurers out there.

1. One thing is how to pack. I prided myself on packing for four days in London in just my little backpack, but it'll be different when packing for a four-month trip. I packed two suitcases and a backpack to take to Europe when I left home, but it may be different for you. Some things to consider include whether or not you'll be staying in one place or one room, etc. I had a permanent residence there where I kept all of my stuff. Yes, I traveled, but I never had to pack up all of my things and move to a new place except when I left. That said, I still packed too much. I didn't wear all of the clothes I bought (style differences and such) and I bought clothes. I also could have bought the extra makeup and things while in Scotland, but I didn't know that.
2. So think. There for four months? OK, the weather will change. If you've got someone willing to send you different clothes, do that. Swap them out by mail. If not, just don't bring as many. No one is going to notice that you wore that same shirt twice last week because you happened to do laundry in between. They won't care.
3. Don't bring t-shirts except to sleep in, unless you want people to know you're an American. I didn't really care, but if you're on your own, it may not be as safe. You'll buy clothes when you're there anyway, so you should still bring only what you know you'll wear. Not "Well, if I go to this type of event, I'll wear this..." Nuh-uh. Don't think that way. It'll lead to more things in your suitcase and maybe even more suitcases.
4. Also along the packing light idea is that you'll buy souvenirs and, if you don't want to send them via mail (breakables and such), you'll want to pack them or take them in a carry-on which means displacing other carry-on items. You won't want an extra suitcase, like I had. Yeah, I didn't mention that. I packed 2 suitcases to travel TO Scotland, but I had 3 coming back. One was souvenirs.
5. PLAN! Yes, it's true what they say about "best laid plans", but at least if you have a plan and it goes awry, you're not completely up a creek without a paddle. You should make alternate plans. Other options. Be able to think on your feet. Like what happened with that hostel in Rome. OK, I'd made the reservations for the wrong night. But there was a vacancy so I wasn't scrambling, though I would've found something. I was able to use my lap top (which I had reluctantly brought with me and turned out to be a blessing) and book a different hostel and to double check the other reservations to make sure they were right. Plans may have to change, but if you have them you'll feel so much better and things will go a lot more smoothly.
6. Don't freak out. I did a few times and it doesn't help. I'm embarrassed to say that I freaked out about getting lost once or twice when hostels weren't where I had thought or where they had directed us to, but it all worked out. Part of it was sometimes not speaking the language, like in Rome and in Florence. We had trouble, but it ended up being all right.
7. Explore. OK, so you've got a map and no idea where to go for dinner. GO! Just start walking. Sometimes you find the coolest things such as the pictures at the end of this blog!
8. Make friends. Strangers don't have to stay strangers. I met some lovely people on my tours and just while walking around. If I'd felt more comfortable, I'd have truly met some friends, but I didn't have the confidence to put myself out there to make those friends. Not everyone is out to take advantage of you. That said...
9. Be careful. I mean it. Conceal your valuables and always keep a bit of extra cash in your bra or a hidden money belt just in case. Also, I have a passport card, separate from my actual passport, which I did keep in my money belt (or bra if I didn't have that). That way I could still be IDed as a US citizen at an embassy and could retrieve a new passport a bit easier. It was an extra few bucks, but worth it if you need it. Luckily, I never did, but things can happen.
10. Tours? YES! Even if they cost a bit extra, KNOWING what you're seeing is always so much more exciting than just LOOKING at something without understanding it a bit more. Free or paid-for, tours are worth the time/money/etc. that you put in.
11. FOOD! Food is a huge thing for me, especially since I aspire to attend culinary school some day. Try local delicacies. Haggis is disgusting, but I tried it. Fish and chips! I usually hate fried fish, but this stuff was amazing! Seriously. If you're ever in Edinburgh, look up Globe Trotters (it may be one word. I don't remember). Best fish and chips ever. So much better than anywhere else I tried it and I tried it all over the place in the UK. Nothing in the US comes close. But don't be afraid.
12. Lazy? You're like me. Don't be like me. I missed out on a couple of festivals and even a few nights out because I was "too tired" or something like that. Don't do that. Go on 4 hours of sleep. You'll have the memories and it's worth more than hearing the stories later because you were too lazy or too tired or whatever.

Those are my tips. I hope you take them to heart and learn from them. I'm serious. I had an amazing time and I'd do it all over again if I could. My next plan is to travel to Australia on a work and holiday visa some time after Feb. 2013. Hopefully with a friend or my cousin, but we'll see if either of them can make it. I'm going with or without someone, though. Expect a new blog!

Remembering the Good Days...

Hey all. I know I said I wouldn't post here again, but I have to tell you how much I miss Edinburgh. I'm glad I could share my adventures with you, but reading through my previous posts makes me very sad to have left such an amazing and truly magical city. I hope you fell in love with it through my words as I did with all of my senses. This whole experience was so wonderful and I can't wait to continue to share that experience with my friends and family.
Do you have questions for me? I'd be happy to answer them. Post them in the comments box. Perhaps you want to know what food I miss most? What activity? What people? Anything!

The End

If you know my schedule, you’ll know that I am home by now. Yep. Home, safe and sound in my own house and my own bed. It’s nice, I have to say. More space to move around, healthier food… Let’s face it; I was living the college student diet which is “whatever’s convenient, easy, and fast.” But I’m home now. It was an adventure just getting home too. Want to know? Of course you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t be reading. So, if you don’t care, stop reading. That’s right. Stop. OK. The rest of you, continue to live my story through the following words.

As many of you know, if you read back a few blogs, I messed up my sleep schedule, so leaving for Edinburgh Airport at 7:15am was really like leaving for the airport after a really long day. Originally, my plane was supposed to leave at 9:25am and get in around noon local time in Newark. From there, I was supposed to catch a 2:30pm flight to Kansas City and land at 4:37pm. But… best laid plans… and all that jazz.

The first flight was delayed and ended up taking off at 10:35ish. Well, of course that damn volcano made it so that we had to fly up and around it, adding on more time. I slept a little, but I was too worried about making my connection to really relax. Those of you who know me… well, you know stress and worry keep me awake. But normally, being that tired, I should have been able to sleep. Apparently not.

So we land in Newark just before 2. No big deal, right? 30 minutes to get my bags, go through customs, re-check my bags, and get to a whole other terminal. Fat chance. Getting the bags alone took more than 30 minutes. Well, my original flight was delayed by nearly 30 minutes. Great, right? Wrong. When I went to re-check my bags, the lady told me I would have to get on another, later flight. Eff. I still had 15 minutes. I had every confidence that I could make it to the terminal and through security in that time. She wouldn’t let me try. Eff again.

So I am now booked for a flight that is supposed to leave at 4:30pm but is already delayed to 5:44pm. I can deal with that. Puts in me back in Kansas City a little before 8. Late dinner. I can deal. I’m sitting by the gate and, as I’m writing the rough draft for this particular post, I see that the stupid plane is now delayed to 6:25. A whole 2 hours. So here I am… tired as all hell, going on very unhealthy food for the last 24 hours… oh and about 4 hours total of sleep for the last 34 hours. I know I get frustrated easily, but this just seemed ridiculous.

On the bright side, I was already in the US. I wouldn’t have to find a way back into my flat or anything back in Edinburgh and I knew I had a flight out no matter what. The question remained… “Would the flight get delayed again?” Did I mention that I did not have my cell phone? I left it at home and simply bought one in Edinburgh. Of course that cell phone did not work once I got back to the US, so I had to buy a phone card. Mom and Dad could not get a hold of me, so I had to keep lugging my backpack (which was heavy due to the lap top) over to the phone booth area. But I couldn’t see my gate or the screens at the gate from there, so I would have to come back to the gate to be sure of the departure time.

All in all, not one of my better days. Sad thing is that it was the end. Well, I have had no good experiences with Newark Airport. None. I hate the damn volcano in Iceland that has decided to really mess with my travel.

Oh, but let’s get back to the actual travel. Shall we? So 6:25 gets here and we haven’t boarded yet. Want to know what the announcement was? “There’s a problem with the plane. We’re currently fixing it and will update you in 30 minutes.” Well, by this time, the screen said we weren’t scheduled to depart until 8pm. Great. Wonderful.

Luckily, by 6:45, we’d boarded the plane and were about to pull away from the gate. It ended up that I landed in KC about 5 hours after I was originally supposed to. I was tired as hell, but I was home. Thank goodness!

For those of you wondering, my ingenious plan to stay up all night before leaving worked. No jet lag. I slept 10 hours when I got home, then 9 hours the next night. But I was rested when I woke up and I haven’t had any problems. So, I was not a happy camper during my travel time, but I was back on a decent sleep schedule as soon as I got back. WOO HOO!

That is all, readers. Thank you for your time and attention. I’ve been glad to share my adventures (fun, frustrating, and fantastic) with you, but my Scottish adventure is over. Ta!

Eyjafjallajökull

Eyjafjallajökull. It is the source of many problems, especially for study abroad students at this time. Eyjafjallajökull. Can you pronounce that? Didn't think so. Neither can I. Thus, I cannot formally curse the freaking volcano which is causing so much trouble and misery. I cannot shout to the sky "Curse you Eyjafjallajökull!" because I cannot actually say "Eyjafjallajökull".
How long has this been going on, now? A month? Yeah. I got back from Easter Break just in time to not get caught by the first disturbances. Dana and I flew in the night before it erupted. I was up at the castle last week, though and people were talking about how Edinburgh Airport was closed. CLOSED! Well, now... I've been checking. Apparently I'll be OK. They're putting extra fuel in the planes so they can go around all the ash and stuff, but this makes the flights longer.
Eyjafjallajökull. You are troublesome, Eyjafjallajökull. $20 to the first person who can pronounce that correctly. Well, this was just a rant for me. Not really informative. You can copy and paste the name of the volcano into Google or Wikipedia and get more info. Remember... Eyjafjallajökull. Bah!

Sleep? What is that? *twitch*

Not sure if it will say, but I'm writing this at nearly 4am local time. Why, you may ask? Well, it's a terrible logic. Basically, 4am here is 10pm back home. That's a reasonable time to go to bed, right? Too early for me, so I'm staying up a little later. I figure I'll just stay up all night before the flight home (sleeping in really late on Tuesday which is the day before) and then sleep on the plane. I function more (if not better) on 2-4 hours of sleep. Weird, I know.
Again, I know this is a terrible logic, but it might put me on a schedule faster. We'll see. Check for an update in a few days on the jet lag status. I have no faith in this plan, but I cannot change it now. Wish me luck. That is all, readers.

Final Adventures in the Land of the Scots

OK. Most of you know that I'm coming back to the States next week. I went on two more day trips this past week with a friend of mine and that's about all I'll be doing during my last few days.

The first trip was on Monday to Castle Campbell which is just outside a town called Dollar. Dollar is only about 30 minutes, by bus, from Stirling which we took a train to in about an hour. Not too much travel time there. It's a pretty cheap trip too. Once you get to Dollar, the way to the castle is pretty well marked so on we went! No one told us it would be a 30-minute hike up hill to get there, though. My legs were screaming at me when we reached the top. Then, of course, there was scaffolding covering an entire side of the castle, so that was very uncool.

Really, Castle Campbell is quite tiny. It's mostly just a shell of what it used to be and quite unimpressive if you've seen other castles such as Dunnottar and the like. If you get to Scotland and you want to go to Castle Campbell, make it your first castle. Trust me. The hike up and back was gorgeous though. Everything was so GREEN! I can't say I've ever seen anywhere so green before. There was a little creek running along the entire trail and every once in a while there would be a waterfall. The water was so clear. Everywhere you looked, the view was breathtaking.

As I said, the castle itself was unimpressive, but the views from the top of it and from the hillside above were amazing. It was a beautiful day for a walk, too. Sunny, but not too hot. If I had been going on a nature walk/hike, my day would easily have been fulfilled. Not much else to talk about there.

Tuesday, Dana and I had booked a bus tour to Rosslyn Chapel and part of Hadrian's Wall. We booked through "Heart of Scotland Tours" and ended up with a medium-size bus. That does not mean it was small, though. It was still quite large and there were only 9 people in our group including Dana and I! We had a great tour guide. His name was Davey. Very entertaining, though he did tend to ramble sometimes.

Our first stop, once we got out of rush hour in Edinburgh, was Rosslyn Chapel. Unfortunately, there was scaffolding all over the roof and inside the ceiling here too, but it's for preservation purposes. The chapel is over 600 years old and after 1592, it wasn't used for 270 years. The St. Clairs who had built it refused to use it as a Protestant church and wished it to remain Catholic so they closed the doors, boarded up the windows and took out many of the relics and the altars. Before it was restored, Oliver Cromwell stabled his horses there while attacking the nearby Rosslyn Castle. I don't know the exact date of this. However, one thing which baffles many people is that Cromwell did not order the church to be destroyed. He had attacked many castles before and left them as piles of rubble, but for some reason he kept this one standing.

In 1862, Queen Victoria told the Earl that she wanted it to be used again so a restoration of the chapel was begun. However, it was not enough to save the chapel. Even through the 1950's, if you have entered, the walls would have been green and black with mold. Know why? It's the sandstone. Sandstone is a very porous stone. It absorbed the water throughout the centuries and during the first restoration, a sort of cement wash was painted onto the walls. This did more damage than good, though. It trapped the moisture and did not allow the sandstone to dry out. So now the cement wash is gone and 14 years ago, a £13 million project was begun to dry it out, save the carvings and ultimately save the entire chapel. You see, the Earl was told that if he did not do something soon, the chapel would not be standing for much longer. Now, they are almost finished. The walls are gray-tinted thanks to that cement wash, but they are drying out. The first order of business when the restoration began was to put an enormous metal canopy over the top so as to keep the chapel from rain and snow. This has allowed it to slowly dry out. The canopy is supposed to come down in June of this year.

They have been restoring every inch of the chapel. If you've heard of the famous "Prentice Pillar", you may have also heard the rumor that the Holy Grail is actually hidden inside it. In recent years a man came in with an axe intent on finding the grail inside the pillar. He was restrained, but to be sure, x-rays were done of all the pillars. They are simply stone. As I said, every inch of the chapel has been restored, including the floor. When doing a scan of the ground below the tiles, they found vaults beneath the floor, some even as deep as the chapel is high. Men, women and children of the St. Clair family have been buried there since the chapel was first built. There is an entrance in the floor of the chapel to the vaults, but it was known to be sealed as early as 1750. For 250 years at least, no one has been down there. Many people speculate about what is also hidden down there besides the bodies of past St. Clairs. Some say Templar Treasure, the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant (Indiana Jones has been looking in the wrong place). No one is allowed to investigate though. The current Earl wishes his ancestors to remain undisturbed. So we'll just have to keep speculating until someone does get access.

Well, on to Hadrian's Wall! Have you seen Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves? With Kevin Costner? There's a scene in the beginning where Robin Hood is attacked by knights and it was filmed at a place along Hadrian's Wall called Sycamore Gap. It's literally just a dip in the land at the center of which grows a Sycamore tree. Very steep walk. Very... steep. We had to park quite a ways off and then walk down a hill, back up, then down slightly and back up, then down two more steep hills and up to get to Sycamore Gap... If you'll remember, I had a bit of a hike to and from Castle Campbell the day before. I was still in pain. I'm proud that I made it, honestly. It was worth it, though. Very beautiful walk, beautiful views and such a feeling of being in history.

For those of you who don't know, Hadrian's Wall was built by the Roman emperor Hadrian's legions at the original border between Roman-occupied Britain and the part of Britain occupied by the Picts and the Celts and other tribes. It was never meant to withstand a siege, but rather to control the flow of people. After all, it would have been easy just to sail around it. You can look up more history, but that's the gist.

On the way back to Edinburgh, we stopped in Melrose and saw the Abbey there. Beautiful ruins. We got there just before 5 and the last admittance is at 5. We were sort of out of luck with the rest of the town too when it came to getting a coffee or souvenirs or anything. Every place closed at 5.

I had a final the next morning. That's not relevant to this blog, though. Just setting up a time line. I finished the exam, turned in my last paper and headed for the Royal Mile. Dana and I ate at the Elephant Café. It's where JK Rowling first began writing Harry Potter. Some of you may realize that I ate there at the beginning of my time here, but Dana hadn't gotten to yet. And I like it. It's a cute little place.

After lunch, I was finally off to see Edinburgh Castle in all its splendor. It was a sort of dreary day, but it was warm and not too windy. I couldn't believe how beautiful the views from the castle walls were. For those who do not know, Edinburgh Castle is built on an old volcanic plug. The formation it makes with the Royal Mile is called a crag and tail formation. When the glaciers cut their way through, the volcanic rock was too hard for them to grind down so they parted around it. On all three sides, the softer rock was ground away, but the last side created the tail part of the formation. Stirling Castle was built the same way. This is a great defense as well.

Not all of the castle is open to the public, of course and I saw as much as I could, but it did not take me as long as I expected. I think quite a bit more was roped off then than normally is off limits. Not sure why, but it definitely looked like many of the areas that I was unable to get to were usually open to visitors. Oh well. I still enjoyed myself a lot up there. Beautiful views, rich history... can't really ask for much more.

I finished up my souvenir shopping after that and headed back to my flat. As of now I have only 5 and a half days left in Edinburgh. It's been my favorite place out of everywhere I've visited. I love this city. It's not too big, but you still have that feel of being in a major city. It's the second largest in Scotland. I love that I can walk 5 minutes or less in any direction and find so many different things. I'm maybe 10 minutes from the Royal Mile and/or Princes Street so shopping is easy. The transportation is wonderful. I really have loved my time here and I'm sad to leave, but I'll be glad to be home and see my friends and family... not to mention eat the foods I've missed like Chipotle... and those tacos in Fayetteville. Well, I believe that is all for now. I'll post maybe once more, but otherwise this blog has reached its end. Thank you for reading!

Kilts checked to date... 123