Nothing to Do with Swimming, Part 1: London and Edinburgh

The unexpected aneurism in the wife of one of my swimmers, and the Chevy Chase-like vacation of my cousin made for some deep thinking.  Well, I don't really do deep.  But I know what I want, now.

The swimmer and his wife were just about to set off on a three-month adventure in the Far East, young kids in tow, when their trip -- and their lives -- were changed forever.  The cousin didn't have a life-changing event on her trip.  But she and her husband saved for years to see France, and then they selected a tour that must have been dreamed up by a six-year-old with a birthday party agenda.  I want balloons!  And cake!  And a piñata!  And games!  They saw like ten things a day riding on a bus with strangers and a tour guide, for a week, managing to somehow cover almost all of the country's hot spots in one memory-blurring crush.  And to top it off, they both ended up with Covid.

The swimmer's wife is hospitalized now, making small gains each day, with the trip and its many stops and visits to relatives cancelled.  The cousin and her husband are home again, and recovered.  One trip cancelled, one trip a horrible, cheesy packaged deal.  Both not what I want.  I want to go while we're healthy and can still go on adventures.  I want my own curated trip, to see just the things I want.  And I want to do it slowly -- so slowly that we don't see it all, and have to come back again.

Bus-touring like the cousin did is basically my idea of Travel Hell.  Tour guides cracking corny jokes and going on and on while wearing their headsets like crowns of history trivia are not my idea of a good time.  I know some people, especially on cruises, make lifelong friends.  But our experience riding a minibus, on a one-day tour leaving from the Edinburgh bus station, was not that.  I looked at my seat-mates wondering who would be our allies if the tour bus plunged into a dark cave, and found them all wanting.  We would have to escape first and send help.

So I've decided that all I want to do is vacation, with just enough work in between trips to do laundry and get the juices flowing for my next adventure.  Life is just too short not to see all the things I've been dreaming about.  And life is too short to be so creaky or timid that you have to ride around on a tour bus, with frequent "comfort stops" at gift shops because you are either afraid of public transportation or afraid to drive in a foreign country.  I get that planning each day is tough, with the accompanying travel and lodging details, but that's really one of my favorite things about travel.  I feel more connected when I learn all the details.

We started our trip in London for a few days, visiting a friend of mine from college, seeing a lower-division soccer game, and catching two West End shows plus Henry V at the Old Globe Theater.  Seeing Shakespeare at the Old Globe is like eating a tomato picked from the vine on a summer's day.  That's the only way to do it.  We took a
train to the Duxford Air Museum and wandered, almost alone, among the huge airfield and its six giant hangars filled with cool aviation history.  The mostly-retired male guides almost fought over us, trying to lead us on private tours and point out interesting facts.  Traveling in winter is the best.  You see everything you ever wanted to, up close and with no lines -- but wearing jackets.

In Edinburgh, after our jaunt to Shetland (see Part 2 and 3) we saw another play, went to a comedy night, toured the royal Yacht Britannia, and took the aforementioned day tour to Loch Lomand, the Kelpies, and Sterling Castle.  Comedy night in Scotland for tourists is not quite as funny as it is to locals, since a good 40% of the material was unintelligible and not because of the acoustics.  While Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are funny even to Americans, there were a lot of Scottish in-jokes we missed, even when we could understand the comics.  But the local beer and food were terrific.  And it turns out haggis, when mixed with mushrooms, cheese, and greens, in a kind of grilled-offal sandwich, isn't really so bad.

The Kelpies were on my list partly because of the cool legend they represent:  mythical giant horses that rise from the sea and seduce people with their horsey charm, before dragging them back into the sea to their death.  I'm a sucker for love stories!  But mostly I just love giant ass statues.  I'll take a St. Louis Arch if I have to, but each town really needs things that light up and tower over the landscape, preferably semi-frightening.  Riding the bus to the Kelpies, just outside Edinburgh, was the first stop on our guided day tour.  Just thinking of my cousin riding that bus in France day after day, with mid-morning stops for coffee, lunch stops parked next to 20 other busses, and afternoon stops sandwiching around the sites was ghastly.  At least our tour was over in one day.

Loch Lomand was very cool, meandering into the mist, Scotland's largest lake.  It's also the site of one of the country's largest Open Water swims, which beats Lake Del Valle all to hell.  We wandered into a pub for a drink, which was filled with every non-working antique within 20 miles.  Rows of grandfather clocks, stuffed heads of animals with horns and enormous trout all had their backs to the pub's walls.  Voted Best Pub in Scotland, though the certificate could have been hand-printed, was a plus.  Scots love their rugby, and the bar's TV had giant men with giant quads wearing giant striped shirts in action.  Somehow, it was the only pub stop we had with warm beer, which -- while annoying -- made it seem even more authentic.  

In town we visited a local exhibit on Knitwear, of all things, at a giant weaving studio in Edinburgh.  Coco Chanel, who spent her early famous years as a member of the Nazi Fan Club, really did brilliant work.  I'd wear one of her dresses from 1920 today.  After the exhibit we wandered over to the third-floor viewing area, looking down on modern weavers working below.  Some of the looms are thirty feet tall, and mechanically move up and down like paper towels in a public restroom  All the weavers had headphones on (better to avoid dumb non-questions like Wow, that's so cool), and all of the work was both colorful and incredibly detailed.  The projects typically take months to complete.  I've never seen that art form created before, and on such a grand scale.  I should be able to suck it up and sew on more buttons at home. 

The Royal Yacht Britannia was a fun outing, riding the crosstown bus to the city's waterfront where it is permanently docked in retirement.  Oddly, a shopping mall was built around the entrance to the exhibit, on the third floor.  I can't imagine Harry showing Megan his bunk when he was a kid on vacation, after taking the escalator past Burger King.  After watching The Crown, I basically know everything about the Royal Family, so I was predictably charmed.  One of the guides stationed on the sun deck (again, they nearly fought over us) asked us where we were from.  When we said San Francisco (my go-to place that I've adopted as my hometown), he rattled off stories about the time Britannia visited the city, including showing us newspaper clippings saved on his phone that he called right up.

We also went whiskey tasting.  Whiskey, with the "e" is the way it's spelled in Scotland; without the "e" is the way it is written in Ireland and America.  One should adopt the correct spelling of the one you are drinking, so "whiskey" it is.  On a previous trip we learned that heating the kettles in the distillation process was traditionally done with wood-burning heat sources.  But on one side of Scotland there are no trees and on the other there are (thank you, North Sea).  On the no-tree side they cut out cubes of peat from the soil.  (Peat is an excellent carbon-sink, however, so don't forget to raise a glass to the Earth as you destroy it.)  Using peat as a fuel in distillation makes the whiskey taste smokey (or smoky), which is definitely an acquired taste.  It's especially deliciously if you're the kind of person who enjoys cleaning old ashtrays with your tongue.

Being a normal person, I thought I was doomed to only like "blended" whiskeys, like Americans prefer.  But single malt, which is the wine equivalent of a varietal, can also come in non-smokey flavors if you know the right guy wearing a kilt.  I found several whiskeys I liked, and was better for the experience. We had a mini-tasting in the Whiskey Bar of the Balmoral Hotel, a luxury old-world experience that was a lovely splurge.  Next to us was an older man wearing business casual, with a date who was at least 30 years his junior.  She was the first non-debutante I've ever seen who wore elbow-length gloves, and she was wearing a drapey dress that was like the kind of thing people yank off new cars when they are revealed at an auto show.  We'd been to that bar once before, and the guy sitting next to us the previous time was a friend of the Prince of Monaco.  We talked about rugby of course, because I know so much about striped shirts and giant quads.  JK Rowling reportedly lived in that hotel for years while she wrote her later books, when she could afford this lifestyle on a daily basis.  We didn't run into her, though she probably had an anti-Trans-rights gig, which she now has time for after her career has peaked.  Locals don't really sit at a whiskey bar; they're more likely to have a pint at a comedy club.  But it was a glorious connection to make with the country.

Here's to more travel, and not on a bus.