This is the most recent photo taken of me.
It was taken for my annual Texas Press
Association pass. I am reactivating the Mcobbit
Blog to cover my activities while in Scotland this
time. Most photos will be available on flickr where
my flickr name is; Guided by the light.

Texas State Railroad Park #2

Texas State Railroad Park #2, originally uploaded by Guided by the light.

This is what the politicians want to do to the Texas State Railroad. What do you think about that?

Flower hair.

It has only been 25 days since my last post so I guess I am getting a little better.I do intend to keep this blog going and I just have to work it into my daily habits. This photo came from Judy Bednar's butterfly garden in Austin. It is a tiny flower and I was surprised to see the hairs when it was enlarged. The Sony Cybershot DSC T1 continues to amaze me but I am going to replace it with an SLR .

Flower hair., originally uploaded by Guided by the light.

Wet,red and yellow

It has been a little over a month since I returned from my long stay in Scotland. During that time I have gotten much more involved with photography. Discovering flickr.com has to be the main reason. I made my living as a photojournalist a long time ago but my work with a camera had fallen through the years to the level of just taking 'pretty kid' or 'hello mom' or 'we were there' shots. I would still see the other kind of shots but there was no gallery or any way to share them so what was the point. Flickr and digital photography has changed all that. In the first month of my serious use of flickr.com I have gotten a thousand views of about one hundred pictures. That would be a satisfying turnout at a gallery, at least in this part of the world. A link to the flickr site is posted in the sidebar.
During the month I thought about this blog and what, if anything I would like it to become. As you see all over the web, so much of this kind of stuff turns into some form of ego-casting and I would like to refrain from that as much as I can. Writing to a blog like this exposes many weaknesses; patterns of thought, inability to spell...lol...weaknesses in grammar, and has to result in some self promotion, even if it is only that implicit in the form. Cain't make no cakes without breaking a few eggs though.
The positive side of daily blogging for me lies in necessarily creating the discipline to write on a daily basis and to offer, in whatever limited form, the result to the world. My hope would be that a carryover from daily blogging would result in more writing on the fictional projects that I have at hand, both in poetry and fiction. Having MSWord cuts down considerably on the spelling and grammatical errors to which I am prone.

Whether or not I can keep from talking about politics remains to be seen. I am not bashful about politics, but I don’t like much about either side of U.S. national and international politics and I can usually anger both Democrats and Republicans within a couple of short sentences and I am finding that at this age, losing friends over such nonsense does not make me feel better.

I don’t expect many readers and I am not going to feel like I have to try to increase readership. If some find it interesting, that is good. I hope to post daily, including a photograph. It may be that Blogger can’t handle that many photographs and I will have to cut back, but we can deal with that later. I may try to make a separate blog on digital photography and digital moviemaking at a later time.

And a little child shall lead them.








Mac and Bo

My Last Day in Scotland
This time around

This is the afternoon of my last full day in Scotland. Tasca, Bo and I went out to The Engine Shed, (you can see a review of this interesting place at http://www.list.co.uk/restaurants/edinburgh/vegetarian/index.php?q=u,v399,o1), and had lunch. Scones, tea, Welsh stew, soup and rolls made a delicious lunch. Everything is made from fresh ingredients and the taste is so much better than the food you can buy out in inexpensive places in the states.
Tasca asked me what I would miss about Scotland and I came up with a few things;
Obviously I will miss the family. Bo is so cute, and growing so fast that I hate to miss any part of it, and they have all been so nice to me and so easy to get along with during my visit. I hope that they feel the same way. I will miss the great bus transportation system and not having to buy gasoline for two months, but I won't miss the traffic noise and smell along the main streets. I will definitely miss the dramatic landscape: the castle and Arthur's Seat and the Salisbury Crags. I will miss the many Indian, Thai, and Africian restaurants that fill the blocks. I will miss the friendly neighbors and friendly people on the street but I won't really miss the changeable Scottish weather. ( Although after a couple of days of the +90 weather and 100% humidity at home I may be ready for some more Scottish weather, changeable or not.) I will miss the Guardian, one of the best newspapers I have ever read even if it is a bit shocking at times to an American and a bit left leaning. I will miss The Meadows and taking Bo for a long stroller ride into the playgrounds and I will surely miss being able to pop into the Auld Hoose for a pint of Guiness, fresh off the tap.
We have a babysitter for this evening and are going to do a little pub hopping. We are going to the Bow Bar, both for the name and to see why it is the only pub shown on the bus map of Edinburgh. Then we are going to Sandy Bells Pub for some live Scottish music, and then to Doctors for a nice pint and some Scottish pub chow.... chips and something, or something and chips.....
I will be back in Houston about 4:35 on Saturday, CST, and will go to Center with Luke. I will blog on this site again early next week so check in again, same time, same place.
Mac

Climbing the Mystic Mountain

On Tuesday I completed one of the adventures that I really wanted to do from when I first arrived here. I climbed Arthur’s Seat. The mountain, looming over Edinburgh at 823 ft. dominates the landscape even more than their majestic castle. The whole family had climbed the Salisbury Crags on the day after Ana arrived and the climb honestly was a pretty good struggle for me. I had injured my knee by stepping in a stump hole while on a walk at Flo back in the early autumn. It had prevented walks for the whole winter and was still acting up as late as the trip we took to the Zoo back in April.

We started Tuesday at about 9:40 on a cold but clear morning. Jim kept Bo and Tasca and I set out for our little adventure. Tasca insisted that it would rain sometime that morning, Scottish weather being as changeable as it is, and took rain gear for us both.

“It won’t rain today.” I pontificated, looking at a blue sky with small clouds scudding by.

Famous words to remember.

We went up St. Leonard’s lane, and then took The Queen’s Drive around the mountain to the south, past Duddingston Loch. That road climbed pretty gently, with sidewalk all the way, until we left it and began our upward climb on the grass-covered slope. Everything went well and we made good time as we admired the views that were showing themselves as we climbed ever higher. I thought that we were going pretty fast, but this Scottish guy with a child on his shoulder came from pretty far below us to reach the top sometime before us.

We met him on his way down and he said that the wind was too cold up there for the child. He wasn’t kidding.

At the point where the grass pretty much stopped and the bare rocks began, there were several paths upwards, all more or less precarious. I chose the one with the steps and we continued to climb. The wind was gusting from thirty to forty miles an hour and the temperature was somewhere below fifty degrees F. and felt like ten below when it hit you. The top has several small flat areas that held shallow pools of water. We took photos, and met a group from Ohio who were in Edinburgh for a wedding. Both the groom and the bridegroom were from Ohio, but they were going to live in Edinburgh. I took pictures of the city, and we started down.

We descended the eastern side, hoping for an easy time on the gentler northern slope, and that we might catch a bus home from near Holyrood Palace where we would reach level ground. We stopped at a sheltered place among the very prickly gorse to eat a small snack and have some water. As we continued down from there a few drops of moisture fell and Tasca felt that she had been vindicated for carrying the rain gear and told me so several times. (Even though I never needed to wear it.)

Farther down the northern slope there are the ruins of a fourteenth century chapel, (a very small one.) and we made a brief detour to visit it. The wind was blowing even harder, nearly lifting us off our feet, so we made the visit pretty brief.

This is my last week in Scotland since I leave on Sat. morning. I will post in this blog another time or two and then finish it off when I get back to Flo on Mon. or Tues.

Arthur's Seat

Arthur's Seat, originally uploaded by mcobbit_2.

A bright, cold morning perfect for climbing small mountains, or very large hills.

McArthurs seat

McArthurs seat, originally uploaded by mcobbit_2.

With Arthur's Seat in the background I take a brief rest while contemplating the rain threatning (not) skys.

Top o'the world

Top o'the world, originally uploaded by mcobbit_2.

Or at least the top of Arthur's Seat.

My lovely Sherpa Quide

My lovely Sherpa Guideoriginally uploaded by mcobbit_2.

A break from the relentless wind sheltered by the prickly gorse.

The Ruined Abbey

The Ruined Abbey, originally uploaded by mcobbit_2.

Swinging

A sweater at the end of May.

At long last.... a little;

As you know, I have taken off from email blogging for the last three weeks. After Ana returned to her home I haven't been doing many tourist things, and I was looking for a way to do this that didn't clog up everyone's in box with things that they may not want but were to polite to mention. The weather has been nice here, improving daily and Bo and I have taken long buggy and foot strolls in the meadows. The trees there have bloomed beautifully and leaved out. On some sunny days there have been acres of pasty flesh exposed as the denizens of Edinburgh took advantage of the end of a long dark winter. We visited the Botanical Gardens, and the City Farm. Belthane was held on Calton hill with bunches of nearly naked people running around by torchlight in the cold and we were invited to the Scottish equivilant of a Texas BBQ. I hope to make short entries now every day, and to post a picture or two if I can make things work. Feel free to share the blog with anyone who might be interested.

Week Four, Scotland

Ana, Edinburgh and Glasgow

Week four in Scotland was a very busy week. My friend Ana Sanchez arrived on the previous Friday, and we started her tour of Edinburgh on Saturday by climbing the Salisbury Crags. Then, we attended the Easter festival, in terrible weather, on Sunday. We never looked back the rest of the week, going somewhere every day and even making a trip to Glasgow. I will have lots of pictures and lots of pubs this week. You can guess that Ana is in a lot of the pictures. I think I may send out two mailings of photos because there are so many. Unfortunately, I cannot crop them on this machine, and they are not quite as nice as I usually try to make them.

On Monday morning we purchased two all-day passes on the Lothian Bus System and rode around town for a couple of hours. The passes only cost two quid thirty, or about four dollars and sixty cents, and we never had to wait for a bus over five minutes. I have gotten to know the city well enough to be a passable tour guide. We stopped for a beer in The Hebrides Pub and Ana discovered Guinness for the first time. It was love at first quaff! She drank no other beer for the rest of the week. Sometimes she drank two to my one. How she does that and stays so slim, I don’t know. There was a Scotsman in the pub who possessed a nose that can only be described as monumental. I regret not buying him a beer and getting a picture of him, but I only thought of not wanting to hurt his feelings by drawing attention to it. The bartender shorted my change by nearly eight dollars and when I took it up with him he shorted it again. He was pretty flustered and explained to me that it was his first day. Then he gave me too much change. I gave it back to him as a tip.

We left there and made our way back down to Leith by bus and ate at a pub on the water called The Waterline. It had a large menu of reasonably priced foods. I ordered a broccoli soup, while Ana had a seafood chowder, both of which were delicious. We then made our way across town and shopped at a large grocery store called Sainsbury’s. One strange thing about the store is that the shopping center that it is in only has parking for maybe one hundred cars. The Center, Texas Brookshire Brothers Grocery has more spaces than that. Ana and I got the ingredients, and she made a mushroom risotto for the family. I was so exhausted that I slept through the preparations. Even riding the bus so much, we walked five or six miles that day.

On Tuesday, we walked to town and went to Greyfriar’s Bobby, the pub. It is just in front of the graveyard where the little terrier is buried (the one that supposedly stayed by its master’s grave for so many years). The Queen ordered the dog buried in the cemetery when it died, and as the pictures show, people still honor the grave with flowers. The statue of Bobby is out on the street in front of the pub. Ana had another Guinness and I tried a Deuchars Indian Pale Ale. It is quite different from Guinness, but a style of beer that I like very much. After Greyfriar’s, we met Tasca at the Elephant house, whose main claim to fame is that J.K. Rowling wrote the first part of Harry Potter there. I had found a plaque for the burial of a Professor and Poet named McGonagall on the back wall of the Greyfriar’s cemetery, and there is an old, turreted school just beyond the wall called Heriots School: (Hogwarts?) It is very close to where she wrote.

On our stroll back, we found a small writer’s museum that featured Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson, all Scottish. It was quaint and interesting to see their furniture. It was another free attraction, like many museums and gardens in Edinburgh. From there we went to the Scotch Whisky Museum and saw a presentation of the history and techniques of making Scotch Whisky. I had been there before, and was pleased to see that they now gave the wee dram that is part of the show before you have to sit through the information. But you can imagine my disappointment when I found that they had discontinued the dram after the presentation. I asked for my money back, but they just said that they didn’t know I was Scottish, and no money was forthcoming. We walked all the way back to the B and B. I was really dragging by the time we got there, and even Ana, who does five K. marathons in an hour and fifteen minutes, was tired.

Wednesday was something of a day off because we were both tired and my knee was hurting. We took a bus down Nicholson Street and had dinner at the Auld Hoose, which is my favorite and hers also. While we were there, Jim and Tasca happened by, but they couldn’t bring Bo in because the pub doesn’t allow babies. We went from there to the Festival Theater, which is a stainless-steel-and-glass edifice with the “Johnny Walker” bar on the second level. We went to see a presentation of “Oh, What a Feeling,” a two-hour-and-thirty-minute revue of show tunes of the last twenty years. Think ‘I Had the Time of My Life,’ from ‘Dirty Dancing.’ The ladies all seemed to love it, and were dancing in the aisles, including Ana.

Thursday, we took a bus trip to Glasgow. It is the largest city in Scotland, and the third largest in the United Kingdom. I am including three pictures of the road to Glasgow and you can see the weather change. The sixty-mile round trip only cost three pounds each, a real bargain, and the buses ran every fifteen minutes, (every ten minutes during peak hours). Both directions, our bus was completely full. It was raining almost the whole time that we were there. A Scottish friend said later that it always rains in Glasgow. We walked many miles through Glasgow. We went to Sauchiehall Street, which is the most famous shopping street in Scotland, even surpassing Princes St. in Edinburgh, some say. We walked down Hope Street to the river Clyde, and then along the Clyde until we turned back up to George Square. George Square is the center of Glasgow. There is a statue of Sir Walter Scott atop a tall pillar, and a mounted horseman whose name I forget but who, as you can see in the photograph, was honored with a traffic cone on his head. The hooligans do this to any statue that they can climb in a drunken state and find it most humorous. I think it is childish and dangerous. I nearly fell off that thing trying to get that traffic cone up there. (Not really.)

From George Square,. we walked to the medieval section of Glasgow, took a wrong turn, and went nearly a mile out of the way. It was a steep downhill while we were going, but strangely the reverse on the way back. We made our way to St. Mungo’s and the Glasgow Neocropolis, or ‘City of the Dead.’ The City of the Dead was mostly an uphill walk, so I skipped it. From there the walk back to the Buchannan Bus Center seemed a short distance, over nearly level ground and through the environs of Strathclyde University. It was a large university that I didn’t know existed until that day.

Friday we went to Edinburgh Castle, which is the center of Edinburgh. We witnessed the changing of the guard at the Scottish War Memorial, a twenty-one gun salute to the Queen on the event of her eightieth birthday, ( God save the old girl), and a fine small marching band. The Scottish Crown Jewels and the Stone of Scone are on display in the castle with a good diorama of Scottish history and a recounting of how Sir Walter Scott reopened the relics after they had been hidden away for one hundred and seventeen years. The crown, septure, and sword are not particularly interesting to me, but the Stone of Scone, or the Stone of Destiny, is something else. A common stone by all appearances, but the stuff of legend. Google it!

Ken and Linda Paterson came to Jim and Tasca’s that evening and we got to see them briefly. They were closing their shoe store in Elgin, and moving the inventory down to Glasgow, and just came in for the night. They are lovely people. She is Jim’s sister, and a naturalized British citizen now.

Saturday was Ana’s last day in Scotland and we took it very easy. We did a little shopping and had the pleasure of meeting Jayne (Hudson) Papworth, who was Tasca’s pen pal since Tasca was seven years old. Jayne is a lovely young woman with a three-year-old son named Willy, and another, to be named Joe, on the way. Her husband works for Social Services near Stockton-on-Tees, where Jayne lived when she and Tasca were children. They just popped up to Edinburgh for a day visit, since she and Tasca hadn’t seen each other in about fifteen years. For Ana’s last night, Jim, Tasca, Ana, Bo and I went to an upscale restaurant called Thai Lemongrass. After a week of eating in pubs, it was a pleasure to splurge a little, and Thai food is a favorite of Jim, Tasca and Ana. I much appreciated the place, with its calming music and a large golden statue of the Buddha just over our table. I had chicken satay and spring rolls to start with, then stir fried duck with chilies, and egg fried rice and prawn cakes. We drank a very nice bottle of white wine. After dinner we strolled the length of The Meadows in the eight p.m. twilight and watched all the people enjoying the good weather.

We got up at six-thirty to get Ana to the airport. Everything was uneventful until we said good-bye, and she started her check-in. I took a last photo and was standing there watching Ana, when this guy who must be described as more chubby than burly walked up to me and flashed an ID card like it was a badge.

“Security,” he said. “Someone has just taken a photo in this area.”

“It was me,” I said.

“I’ll have to see it,” he intoned with some seriousness.

“Ok,” I said and started showing him our travel photos of the week. “And this is Bo, trying to stand on her head.”

“No, no,” he said. “I just need to see the one you took here.”

I showed him that one, and was still showing more when he walked away saying, “Just don’t take any more, please.”

I guess he meant at the airport.

Mac

Jim and Tasca, Mac, and Mary Bo at the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens.

Scotland Blog Week 3

Good day…. Week three from Scotland. Well, the highlight of the week had to be my friend Ana from Venezuela via Puerto Rico arriving in Edinburgh. She was routed through Manchester out of Newark for some reason and then the overseas flight was delayed and they didn’t make the connection so I was sitting in the airport holding a bunch of wilting yellow roses and not knowing what was going on. Finally I got Jim on his cell and he told me that Ana had called only five minutes after I left the house and was going to be delayed by a couple of hours. She was on the next flight from Manchester and we were all happy.

This week included a trip to Sainsburys, a grocery store that you take a bus to…We bought a big bill of groceries and had to take a taxi back. The taxi’s are fairly reasonable, especially when there are several people. All of whom would have to pay for a bus ride separately. I will do some photos from the grocery in a later blog to show some of the things that they have that we don’t find in the stores in the states.

On Ana’s first full day in Scotland we walked to the top of the Salisbury Crags. It was a steep climb. We all made it and were rewarded with magnificent views of the city, and surrounding countryside. Jim carried Bo all the time and made it much easier than I did. Ana and Tasca went up the thing like a couple of mountain goats, (very pretty and agile mountain goats.) This day was something of a marathon because we walked down the less steep slope on the northern side to the Scottish Parliament building which looks like it was designed on Sesame Street by children…and then up the Royal Mile as far as the Robbie Burns Pub. Jim and Ana and I tried the Robbie Burns House Ale, called The Exciseman’s 80. Pretty good for a Scottish ale, but I greatly prefer the Irish offering, especially Guinness and Murphy’s.

Saturday evening we dined at an Indian Restaurant named Kismot where we all had Nan bread and either lamb or chicken dishes with Indian sauces. I chose a lamb tiki, in a Madras sauce which was listed as medium hot. It was, plus hot, but delicious.

On Sunday we walked to Princes Street for the Easter Festival. There were crowds, and people playing soccer on stilts, Easter egg rolls, marching bands and salsa dancers. Then the Scottish weather reared its strange head. It was warm, and then about one p.m. it turned quite unpleasantly cold and then it started raining. Unusual for Scotland, thus far at least, and normally according to Jim, it was a hard, cold driving rain. We got wet, and then found a Costa Coffee shop and got big and warm coffees and dried out. While we were there it stopped raining and got warm outside. We went out and it started raining. We walked to Jenners Department store where the shoes ranged from four hundred to one thousand dollars. I didn’t buy any. We caught a taxi home, rather exhausted from the cold rain, and from our adventures on the Crags the day before.

This week we are going to ride the tour busses, visit the art galleries, take a bus to Glasgow, go to Stirling Castle, do the Royal mile and the Botanical Garden. I will keep you posted. Mac

Week Two Blog

Hi…My Scotland Blog picks up on last Monday, after the bus trip to Duddingston, and our long walk back along the southeastern flank of Arthur’s Seat, the eight hundred and forty foot remnant of an extinct volcano that dominates the skyline of Edinburgh. There will be some more pictures of Arthur’s Seat and the Salisbury Crags today, taken from out west of Edinburgh at the zoo.

There was a little less going on this week. I came down with the same crud that the kids had been suffering from, and didn’t go out for about three days. I am proud to report that I have recovered from it, and we made a long trip to the extraordinary Edinburgh Zoo on Sunday.

One day we all had lunch at a restaurant called Blonde. I had the venison casserole with ‘all the trimmings’. It was good. The trimmings were a piece of lettuce, and a plate of mash. (Mash=mashed potatoes, for those who don’t know!) The lunch was part of a newspaper promotion that Jim’s sister Linda had clipped, and we each ate for five quid. (‘Quid’ is an artificial term that they use for pound, like we use ‘buck’ for dollar). For an easy conversion, you can just think that one quid equals two dollars and work from there. That’s not quite right, but it works on the fly.

Each week now, I am going to try to have a story about a visit to a pub, describing what the pub is like, with a picture or two and an ad hoc evaluation of a beer. A warning, though: I am no beer expert, and my beer evaluations are usually limited to “….ummm can I have another?” It is no accident that my favorite spoken line in a movie for 2005 was Merry’s in Lord of the Rings:

“It comes in pints? I got to get me one.”

Two doors north of the covered archway that leads to Hamilton’s Folly Mews is a pub called “The Auld Hoose.” It is a neighborhood pub, but like about three quarters of the Edinburgh pubs, it doesn’t allow children, and “not too many of those unemployed,” according to one of the bartenders.

It has a dartboard, and a cellar (where they keep the beer) that opens under the floor of the front bar. The cellar is labeled ‘dungeon,’ and the bartender quipped that it was for the poor tippers when they got too drunk. The daytime bartender is a young guy who is quite friendly, and who pours a Guinness the right way. It takes several minutes but you wind up getting a pint of beer with about ½ inch of that specially creamy and delicious head that a Guinness fan expects. They have it in ‘regular’ and extra cold. It seems a sin to order a beer that good extra cold. The cellar temp is even a little too cold this time of the year. It seems to build your credibility to order regular also. I ordered a burger and chips. It was tasty, but the beef was overcooked, and the bun dry and cool. The burger and fries were three quid seventy five, with cheddar cheese. They had a five- quid burger that included bacon and the works, but I wasn’t that hungry.

It was a slow time of the afternoon when I was in Auld Hoos, and the bartender and the cook had time to talk. They talked about Texas, and found it hard to believe that no one walked anywhere in Texas. In Edinburgh a large number of families (including Jim and Tasca) do not have cars, and they shop, go to the doctor, movies, etc. within walking distance of where they live. And most of the dwellings are four-story, which means the ¼ of the people live in fourth-floor walkups. Needless to say, there are fewer overweight people around. Tasca thinks that she sees a lot more older people walking in the streets also, but that may be because she lived near the University of Texas for the previous ten years or so.

You may have read that they discovered the first case of bird flu in the UK this week. It was in a dead swan floating in the little harbor at Cellardyke, Fife, which is just a few miles across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. You see a good many swans around in the lochs. I guess that they are mostly local, because the news people seemed to think that some migratory bird must have infected the swan. As of today, Monday, there have been no new cases reported and everyone seems a bit relieved. The main threat right now, and the main concern of the government, seems to be that people will quit poultry for a while and cause some economic damage.

This Sunday, it was a beautiful sunny morning, and we planned a trip to the Zoo. We caught a bus on Nicholson Street. and rode to Waverley Bridge. Waverley is the main access point to the trains and city buses and taxis. When I came last year in November, I got off the bus and dragged my baggage up that great hill and along High Street to Jim and Tasca’s place on Lothian Street. This year, I grabbed a taxi since I was very tired, and it was about a mile farther and my knee was hurting. Waverley is just a few yards from Princes Street, which is the main commercial street in Edinburgh. For the last year, they have only allowed buses and taxis on the street, and it is much more pleasant than before. There we caught another bus to the zoo, about five miles away.

During our visit to the zoo, we had what I have come to think of as typical Scottish weather. During this three-hour visit, we experienced: sunny and warm (removing coats and wraps)… cold...snow (coats back on)….warm… hail… darkening…..snow… warm. Now I know where Texas gets its weather!

The zoo is on the side of a small mountain that rises up from the main Glasgow/airport road, to an estimated height of seven hundred and fifty feet. The zoo must have once been a grand estate, because there is a mansion near the road.

They have a penguin exhibit with hundreds of birds, and a new koala exhibit. I enjoyed the view from the top of the mountain, and have included pictures of Arthur’s Seat and the Crags, and of Leith and the Firth of Forth taken from that vantage point.

My friend Ana, who visited Texas last November and who cooked such a wonderful Thanksgiving day meal for us, with my Uncle Evan Moore as a guest, will be arriving on Friday for a visit to Edinburgh. This is her first visit to the UK, since she and her daughter usually go to Spain when they want a European holiday. I am glad that she decided on Scotland for this year! Mac

Viewing the Patio from above.

Tasca and Bo in front of their house. 

Enjoying a pint at the Sheeps Heid Inn in Dudingston

Week One

March 25-April 1

Hi: This is the first edition of an email blog I am going to try to send weekly or thereabouts during my two months in Scotland. Thanks for the inspiration to Anne Marie McKaskle who wrote such a wonderful account of her time in Italy. I have no hope of reaching her levels of energy, erudition and exploration but I will try to pass along some scenes and experiences here in Scotland.

I left Houston on Continental on March 25 headed for just over two months in Edinburgh Scotland. I will be staying with my oldest daughter, Tasca, her husband Jim who teaches and does research at the University of Edinburgh and my granddaughter Bo. The 8:50 flight out of Houston took me to a seven hour layover in Newark. I had a seatmate named Lillian who was the most pleasant person. She was on her way to spend a month in Geneva with her daughter. It turned out that she was the youngest person in the concentration camps in Montana during WWII, having been an orphan at the beginning of the period, but finding a very happy ending with adoption, and loving foster parents. She was certainly a friendly and gracious lady and I enjoyed our conversation.

The second leg of the flight also found friendly and unusual seatmates…after my last flight to Edinburgh where I sat beside a Scottish soccer hooligan who had the flu and was drunk and constantly bothering the young lady on the other side of him…spilling drinks and food. Anyone would have been an improvement, but I drew two young lads from Edinburgh who were world travelers. They were coming back from Orlando Fl. where they had spent a couple of weeks. What made them unique besides their friendliness was that they were both confined to wheelchairs, and the older brother had rather severe muscular dystrophy and speech problems.

When we arrived at Edinburgh the skies were clear and the plane took a path around the city and I got to see all of the places I had gotten to know in Nov.2004. The city was warm that Sunday, and it completed a series of strange coincidences… The last time I was in Edinburgh Airport it was shirtsleeve weather and it was freezing when I got to Houston. I had to pour hot coffee on the door lock to unlock the Infiniti. This time there was a hard freeze in Houston and shirtsleeves again when I arrived in Edinburgh. Overall the weather has been nicer than it was in Nov. even though most of the locals have cautioned me that it will really be about the same.

I found that Tasca, Jim and Bo were all suffering severe colds or flu when I got here so our outings have been somewhat limited, but everyone is recovering and we have gotten out for some fun.

Yesterday, Sunday, we caught bus 42 to Duddingston Village where the Sheep’s Heid Inn is located. The cost for the bus was one quid (pound) each. It is one of the oldest continually serving inns in Scotland and is not touristy in any sense. We, Jim and I, hoisted a pint of Sheep’s Heid Ale while Tasca and Bo shared a hot chocolate. The ale was described as a stout, but I thought that it was closer to a dark porter. I think from the picture that you can see what else I thought of it. We waited and played moon in the downstairs until a table became free upstairs and then we had a late lunch, early dinner there. Tasca had a Beef Pie with a fantastic pastry on top of the meat pie. Jim had a salmon which he declared very tasty, and I had the Traditional Scottish Roast with All the Trimming and potatoes…..lol. The roast was excellent, not overcooked as is so common in the UK. There was no bread served with it, and the trimmings consisted of three carrot strips and three green beans, but there was a generous serving of potatoes, peeled and cooked whole, with a sort of glaze that made them even tastier. I had finished most of them before Tasca reminded me that I didn’t eat potatoes. I think that she just wanted some of them. The wait staff was superior and much appreciated. She described herself as “ginger” which locally means red hair. A photo of her is included in the attached photos.

After the meal we walked to Duddingston loch and enjoyed the geese, ducks and swans that live there with almost no fear of people. From there we walked back to Hamilton’s Folly Mews on a path that wound around Arthur’s Seat and the Salisbury which was a walk of over two miles. Just this first week in Scotland with all the walking I had to take up my belt a notch. Poor old strained belt…lol. We walk a mile or two at least every day, one or the other of us pushing the carriage.

In other adventures this week we visited Prince’s Street to see the spring flowers and visit the National Gallery. The Waverly-Prince Street crowd was as impressive as usual and we had ice cream just the other side of the of the Scott memorial. Another day we walked a mile or more from St. Leonard’s Lane down the Innocent Railway tramway, once a horse drawn tram from Edinburgh to Duddingston. And on another we, Bo and I, strolled and rode, respectively down to the Meadows. The Meadows is a very large park on the south side of Edinburgh where most of the young guys are playing soccer at any given time on about twenty fields.

Well, I guess that this is your thousand words for the first week. I am including some pictures. If you don’t want to receive this, or if the pictures are too much for your ISP just let me know. Anyone who has specific questions or interests, send them to me and I will try to answer them. Future adventures will include trips to the Castle, to Dirlington, and to Leigh. Tasca says that the zoo here is very good and I might sit in another pub and hoist a pint. Or two.