We took an overnight flight from Newark, New Jersey to Edinburgh, Scotland in early August.
For some reason, when I think of Edinburgh Scotland, I always think of the computer game Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. I think that is when Edinburgh really entered my consciousness. I had watched the children’s game show a few times, but I knew the computer game better as a 7th grader playing it on a black and white Macintosh computer. It always seemed like Carmen, in the game, was doing something like stealing jewels at Edinburgh Castle. The castle seemed so stately, like a giant fortress. Edinburgh and the land of Sean Connery is what I thought about when I thought of Scotland. In fact, we ended up seeing the castle from his movie Entrapment when we visited the Isle of Mull.
I am also a fan of the Outlander novels by Diana Gabaldon and was excited by the idea of seeing some of the places that Jamie and Claire traversed.
I was also excited to arrive in Edinburgh because one of my sisters graduated from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, now PennWest Edinboro, and that college really plays up its Scottish aesthetic. I remember its college brochures, and I always wondered what it would be like to go to a college with so much tartan featured on its gear. While I didn’t choose it for myself, I was glad when my sister A. enrolled there. I was glad that I had a chance to visit her there once. It looked a lot like my college, which wasn’t Scottish themed, but still I was glad that she had that experience and Scottish flourishes on her college things.
Mr. Katie and I decided at some point that Scotland would be a fun place to visit and so we made plans and took our trip earlier this month.
Here are something that I saw in the bathrooms at the Edinburgh airport that tell me that Scots might be more public heath consious than Americans are.
We were very tired when we arrived in Edinburgh at 9:30 AM GMT on Thursday morning. It took us a while to pick up our luggage and our rental car, an electric 7-seater Peugeot. However, before we knew it, we were on the left side of the road and into the mass of traffic circles that surround Edinburgh.
We left the city headed towards our first short-term-rental located in idyllic Fife near the North Sea. (We made plans to return to Edinburgh to tour later in our trip. We had already made a reservation to visit Edinburgh Castle a week from the day of our arrival. First, we would relax and see some, actually many, other sights in Scotland.)
However tired we were though at that point on Thursday morning (and we were all tired after the flight and the time difference), we needed to go somewhere since we couldn’t check into our rental cottege until after 3pm.
So, we decided to take a detour to see the famous golf town of St. Andrews.
Can you tell in these St. Andrews picture that we didn’t really sleep the night before?
St. Andrews was cool but kind of cramped with its narrow feeling roads (especially since we had just arrived from the US). It was also extremely hard to find parking on a Thursday in the early afternoon. We didn’t really see the golf courses, but we did see the outside of St. Andrews Castle, though we didn’t tour it since we didn’t really have the bandwidth to do that at that point. We mostly walked on the pier and relaxed on the beach.
After we left St. Andrews, where it is we headed to our rental cottege in Fife.
Our rental was located along with four other identical cottages, in the middle of a field, not super close to anything, in Fife.
This arrangement proved to be the perfect place for us that evening because all we really needed and wanted to do was relax and sleep.
Eventually, Mr. Katie and Mr. Man left to secure some food for us to eat. They came back from the grocery store Lidl with premade sandwiches and Scottish tea, among other things, that really hit the spot. We found the premade sandwiches available in Scotland to be superior to any that we have ever experienced from an American grocery store.
By the time the morning came, we felt much more rested. We decided to take some videos to and pictures to share with our families and to take some final pictures from our gorgeous cottage in Fife. It was time to continue our journey up the eastern coast of Scotland. It felt, on the Friday morning, like our trip had begun in earnest. We made it, we were in Scotland.
In my next post, I will highlight our daytrip to the eastern coast Scotland town of Pitlochry, which I would highly recommend visiting if you are planning on traveling in Scotland.
