over the hill and through the woods July 29, 2008

We didn’t only see the country by car. We struck out on hikes as well. The Fife Coastal Path goes right through St. Andrews. It’s a beautiful trail that runs along the coast all the way to Edinburgh. That’s a pretty significant distance. We didn’t cover the whole thing, but we made a substantial dent.

The first day, we headed out for a leisurely walk that turned into 8 miles. That isn’t actually that unusual; I took my pedometer this time, and we walked upward of 7 miles on a normal day, just getting around. Toward the end of the week, however, we walked to a couple towns over. That would be to Cambo Gardens on this map. That’s somewhere around 11 miles. That may not be an incredibly significant distance, but whatever, I really just like the fact that we can say we walked to the next town. Before lunch.

The trail runs along the coastline and is by no means flat. They do a pretty good job of showing you where to go, though the trail just kind of disappears at points.

And then, this being Scotland, there’s the odd golf course you have to cross.

You’re right on the water the whole time but it’s also quite hilly. This gives you some spectacular views.

Along with some fanciful scenery.

There were even some brief flashes of comic relief.

That would be a glove on top of a rock. No idea why.

The path itself spends time in the hills, a forest, on people’s farms, on a golf course, and then along the beach. When you can tell where it is, the path is often about a foot wide. At high tide, it even involves some rock climbing. What it does not involve: hand rails or safety measures of any sort designed to head off litigation. You were often right at the edge of a cliff, and the only thing stopping you from stepping off the slippery rocks and into the abyss was the frighteningly alive foliage that exploded in the aftermath of the rain. This was so not a path in the US.

When you decide leave the path and rejoin civilization, you have two choices: walk back or walk up to the road and catch a bus. We chose the walk once and the bus the second time. Even though we had a car, it was so nice not having to rely on one. It’s also not quite the same driving into town as being able to stroll in and say, yeah, we just decided to come on in from another town. On foot.

Should you ever attempt this hike, let me give you two pieces of advice earned from experience: don’t do it the day after a heavy rain, and wear waterproof shoes.

touring Scotland without paying for a single toilet July 26, 2008

We covered quite a lot of ground this time in our cute little car.

We had already done quite a bit of traveling on my previous trips, but it had all been by train. So while we had seen large segments of the Scottish countryside, we had never explored it.

The beauty of spending so much time off the beaten track is that you occasionally discover a gem of a historical site that’s not on the normal tourist trail. Considering that every third town has a castle, it’s really not that difficult.

Case in point:

We found this one by following the historical site signs on a whim. It’s rather small, as castles go, but the construction of the place wasn’t the selling point.

What made it so great: you could climb on it.

Now, I’m sure this isn’t strictly allowed (though it’s not expressly forbidden, either), but the fact that it’s basically a pile of slowly decaying stones in the middle of nowhere with only a few signs hinting at any actual oversight of the place means that this is entirely possible. When we arrived, there were kids climbing all over the thing. So we just follow suit.

You had low walls to start with.

And then you could scale a wall or two.

But eventually you ran out of places to go.

Then you could always just survey your domain.

Notice the sheep in the distance. Mine, all mine. Mwah, ha, ha.

done in by a zip code July 24, 2008

insanity (in san’e te) n. 1. relatively permanent disorder of the mind 2. doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results 3. taking on British bureaucracy with documentation from another country. See also: stupidity

W finally comes home from his Scottish sojourn next month. While I was there, we got the bright idea to start adding me to the accounts he plans to keep and changing his address to the US. Naturally, this relatively mundane part of life in organized society led to much teeth gnashing and pleading for mercy. Our mistake: we took on a bank.

I should pause and explain that in modern British society, there is much concern about terrorist financing. There is also much reliance on automatic debits from your bank account. These two things combine to mean that (1) proving your identity and legal residency in the country is vitally important and (2) you have to have a bank account before you can do anything else. The need for (2) in order to open any other accounts means that the task of vetting you is now effectively left to the banks.

The woman who was assigned to assume the worst about our desire to pull a fast one on them and fund an extremist group seemed very nice. W had already procured the necessary forms and I had come armed with multiple forms of ID from the approved list. This included your normal forms of ID, plus our mortgage statement, our home insurance statement, our utility bill, tax forms, and random other things that involve paying money to businesses. (Incidentally, this all came on the plane with me. No way that was going in the checked luggage. I’ve never been so prepared to whip out multiple pieces of evidence to prove my identity, nor so well equipped as a particularly lucrative mark for an extremely lucky mugger turned identity thief.)

We were prepared.

Our skeptical gatekeeper outlined what she needed from me. Proof of identity with photo. Passport. Check. Proof of identity with address. A driver’s license would be fine, she says. I hand mine over. So sorry, mine won’t work. Only a UK license. Hmm, bit of a problem. You can use any other UK ID. Not so much. No matter, she says, you can use any of these other things on the list to prove identity with address: bills, tax forms, etc. Aha! I have all of this. We hand over the sheaf of bills, statements, and other documentation. She looks it over, furrows her brow and looks again.

Has to be from the UK.

This is a significant problem, seeing as I neither reside in nor pay taxes to the place. Our attempt appears to be torpedoed. However, the list does not specify this UK-centricness. Besides, she lets it slip that she would have accepted one of our bills if she recognized the company. (What? Wells Fargo being in the news every day even in the UK and plotting, along with the rest of the US financial sector, to take your country’s economy down with ours didn’t catch your attention?)

Sensing a break, we start trying to specify which of the things on the list exactly have to be from the UK. Only the government-issued things, it turns out. This leaves open all of the bills. She squints at them for a while longer, then takes it all to her manager. We wait. She returns with good news. Hallelujah! We start the process of making me an official customer.

And immediately run into a snag. Not because we don’t have the right forms, but because of how our address rendered on them. Our mortgage statement includes some legal version of our address that differs slightly from our postal address. This is not kosher. Must match exactly. As we’re explaining that it’s all the same, really, I am thinking, heck, I wouldn’t even believe us. Miraculously, she does. But only to change W’s address to the US.

Still working on finding a loophole to knock me out of contention, she next deems our insurance statement to be another acceptable form of ID. The street address is our normal postal address which, of course, does not match the mortgage statement. It matches everything else, though, so she decides to let that slide. The end is in sight. Then we get to the zip code.

The zip code is normally a five-digit number. Businesses sometimes try to show off and use your zip +4, but this is a pesky little difference. Could you name your zip +4 off the top of your head? Me neither. This, however, is a major issue. Why is it different, she asks. We trip over ourselves trying to explain that it means nothing, really, it’s just a more exact version of the same thing. Nobody uses it. We promise. This is not flying with her. We try to make analogies with the British system, but it doesn’t really work. We look at each other in desperation. I don’t have a single government-issued ID that contains my address with the 9-digit zip code. They don’t exist. How in the world do we explain that no normal mail-receiving American even notices the difference? (Try it sometime; it totally sounds like you’re making it up.) We’re stuck because the Post Office decided to make their routing system more exact.

She assures us that it isn’t theoretically impossible for non-UK citizens to prove identity, just impossible in practice. We give up. Then, for reasons I still don’t understand, she relents. Fine, they’ll add me, though they must change our US address to a weird combination of the legal parcel description and the really specific zip code. I may never actually receive deliverable mail from them, but I’m on the account. We say thank you and run before she has time to reconsider.

And this whole time, there were people behind us in line. You see, this woman is the keeper of the forms. You have to go to her first for a lot of things. There is only one of her. Strangely, nobody seemed to mind the fact that the pushy Americans were totally holding up the line.

more knitting in the news July 22, 2008

It’s just a banner week for knitting in the media. I finally got around to reading this past weekend’s Washington Post Magazine today and came across this article about a woman who fled suburbia to raise sheep in West Virginia. She subsequently opened a yarn shop. I love how she’s selling yarn from her neighbors’ farms.

I also like how delightful she says it is to be able to sit at her computer and watch her sheep. Just a slightly better view than I have from my computer at work!

As Needle-dee pointed out, my knitting group also made it into the news a couple weeks ago. I would, however, like to point out that we are not a “sewing group.” Our needles are much bigger.

a short break from travel blogging July 21, 2008

Knitting made an appearance on Marketplace on NPR today! The did a story on how bricks and mortar knitting stores are having trouble staying in business because we’re all buying our yarn online. The company they chose to profile was Jimmy Beans Wool. I was standing in the kitchen thinking, hey, I know them! I’ve ordered from them many times and they’re great. I’ve even sung there praises here a time or two.

I’ve never, however, thought of the proprietors of the place as people. Like people who can talk and do a radio show. It’s a website that sends me yarn. It was actually sort of funny to listen to them interview the store’s owner. Despite knowing that virtually all of the places that I buy yarn online are, in fact, storefronts somewhere, I don’t really make that connection. Now that I had, listening to a voice behind a website was kind of like hearing someone famous for something that doesn’t involve talking (writer, photographer, etc) speak. They never sound anything like you expected. I now feel like I should call them up periodically to acknowledge their existence.

And, oh yeah, apparently nobody knits anymore. The boom ended in 2005, or so they say. Funny, I hadn’t noticed. My knitting group has already outgrown one location and is massive enough to be kind of unwieldy. We must have all missed that memo.

rain, roundabouts, and radar guns July 20, 2008

These are the certainties of driving in Scotland. The Scottish driving trifecta, if you will. (And sheep and cows and golf courses, too, but they didn’t start with the right letters.) The rain is omnipresent, so it’s a given. This time, at least, the rain came in spurts, so it didn’t rain all day every day. There are roundabouts what seems like every half mile, including on major highways (!!), though not on motorways. And then the speed cameras are everywhere. However, the police are kind enough to announce the presence of the cameras with a sign in enough in advance that you can slow down. Then the cameras themselves are marked with fluorescent colors. Quite kind of them, I think, though it kind of defeats the point of the camera.

If you endure the weather and vagaries of British driving habits, then you’re rewarded with views like this:

The whole country was insanely green. Guess that’s the upside of the constant rain.

The Brits are generally good drivers. The best part: they actually do what they’re supposed to, like stay in their lane, obey traffic laws, etc. The contrast to the homicidal maniac drivers in the DC area is striking. And necessary, given all of the windy little two-lane roads that could pretty much spell doom for everyone is someone doesn’t follow the rules.

Sitting with maps in front of you for several days and plotting a route around the UK drives home just how compact the country really is. And then there were the other clues.

Our radio station choices pretty much revolved around the BBC. No surprise there. However, it wasn’t until we were very nearly all the way to the western coast of Scotland that I realized that the stations had never changed. And we never lost them. Then they would throw out what seemed like obscenely high listenership numbers, which are indeed possible when they are so few stations to choose from. The concept of radio stations that can cover a whole country, or at least a good chunk of it, are a totally foreign concept to me.

Then I noticed the weather reports. They usually went something like this: rain and some sun in southern England and Wales, rain and less sun in northern England and rain and wind in Scotland. Sometimes they’d throw Northern Ireland in, too. Weather for the whole country in under a minute. (And pretty accurate, too, I might add, seeing as it doesn’t vary much.) The weather truly is that consistent around the whole of the UK, primarily due to the much heralded effects of the gulf stream. However, the fact that it’s even possible to do a national weather report just blows me away. We can’t even do a good report for all of most states.

But here’s my favorite thing. After the weather comes the traffic. As a person who lives in a place that is primarily defined by it’s horrible traffic congestion, it’s entertaining for me to be in a place, any place, in which the traffic report trumpets things as problems that we consider to be a mark of a good traffic day. (Going home to Oklahoma–in any of the large cities–is a case in point.)

Initially, we weren’t really paying much attention to the traffic reports. We were in the middle of nowhere, after all, so sheep and highland cows wandering onto the road were our primarily traffic concerns. Then when we started nearing major cities (and when one of our rural highways leading into St. Andrews got closed down for T in the Park), we started to take note. There’s construction on a highway somewhere we don’t recognize. Okay, not a problem. A motorway somewhere else is slow due to construction. Ditto. There’s some sort of construction in Cardiff that has closed down a lane. Not a…wait, did they say Cardiff? That’s Wales. Yes, they were doing the traffic for the whole country. And it took under two minutes. I still can’t get over this. I’m sure that London requires a most specific traffic report, but neither Glasgow nor Edinburgh did. We drove in and out of them both during rush hour, and you’d never have known.

(See a theme to the traffic report above? There was construction everywhere. The way they deal with it on two-lane roads: stick a mobile traffic light on the road to regulate traffic through the stretches where it’s one lane. The most amazing thing–people would actually patiently queue in front of them, even on tiny roads when they could plainly see that there was no one waiting on the other side. In the US, people would be tearing through there, traffic signals be damned.)

It’s also notable that virtually all traffic problems come from congestion or construction–not accidents. In fact, we only saw one incident that could be considered an accident the whole time I was there. It was actually in Stirling, the site of the yarn shop in the last post. By the time we passed, the whole scene consisted of the driver and a couple cops standing around a car that appeared to have rear-ended another car that had already gone on its merry way. Nobody was rubbernecking, and it was all very minor. Never once did we end up stuck in unmoving traffic because of the aftereffects of someone driving like an idiot and running into someone else while trying to make their car bend the laws of physics.

On the way home from the airport after my flight back to the US, it took precisely 5 minutes for me to end up in stopped traffic due to an accident. *sigh* I miss Scotland.

yarn and castle July 17, 2008

Every time we headed out in the car in Scotland, I was armed with a list of knitting stores in our destination city. And I never made it to a single one.

One day on our way to Glasgow, however, we got sidetracked in Stirling. It’s a very old and adorable little city. (This is the site of the Battle of Stirling Bridge. Might sound familiar if you’re a Braveheart fan.) After a surprisingly good lunch at a Chinese buffet (I know, I know, but all food in Scottish restaurants is the same; you can only have steak pie so many times), we walked out of the restaurant and saw this across the street:

A yarn store!

It turned out to be a rather good one, too. It was stuffed full of all kinds of yarny fun. Mostly British yarns, not surprisingly, but a ton of them. The shop is spread out over two levels and had everything from cotton to novelty yarn to wool (their website gives a pretty good overview). The yarn store is adjacent to a haberdashery that carries everything from buttons to fabric to school uniforms.

The shop is right on the town’s High Street and is well worth a visit. I didn’t actually buy anything (stupid exchange rate, though I didn’t come home completely emptyhanded, more on that later), but the people were nice nonetheless.

Once you’ve finished browsing for yarn, Stirling also boasts a fabulous castle, perhaps even better than the one in Edinburgh. A definite must-see, should you ever be in the area.

And then they have this weird pyramid monument thing in the graveyard next door. Not sure what the deal with it was.

Yarn and a castle. What more could a tourist want?

misleading forecasts July 15, 2008

Before heading to Scotland, I faithfully checked the weather forecast to make sure I’d be dressing for the right season. Yeah, that didn’t work. The predicted temperates turned out to be 10 degrees F too high–as in low 50s, rather than upper 60s–which makes a pretty significant difference. Layering came in very handy. That’s not to say this wasn’t my warmest trip to Scotland yet, but I was expecting something closer to at least late Spring in my neck of the woods, rather than what we get in about early March. A chilly March. Where it rains constantly.

The rain wasn’t new, but the sky did some far more dramatic things this time.

Growing up in Oklahoma, a cloud like that meant tornado. In Scotland, it just means your daily afternoon dose of water from the sky.

Actually, though, it’s a miracle that Scotland isn’t freezing year round. Take a look at the UK on a world map. I suspect that you’ll discover it’s much farther to the north than you previously realized. Now take a look at Scotland’s neighbors. The country is on the same latitude as Newfoundland, for crying out loud. The gulf stream is a wonderful thing.

The country’s placement so far up on the globe also makes for very long days. During the winter, it was pitch black by 3:00 in the afternoon. This time, it was still full daylight at

That would be 9:57 PM, taken without a flash. Well, it was 9:57 on my watch. I included W’s watch with its display in 24 hour time just to prove that it wasn’t 10 in the morning. Clearly, our watches needed to be synched. The flip side of this is that the sun comes up really, really early. And this is nothing. Further up into northern Scotland, it never really truly gets dark during the summer.

And yes, I’m wearing a jacket. Very nearly a coat. Long days, cool weather. It’s not a bad tradeoff.

back home July 14, 2008

I’m back with many, many Scotland posts percolating in my head. I even have yarn-related fun to share. The trip was wonderful, as usual. However, I first have to take care of laundry, groceries, and the like.

In the meantime, here are a series of fabulous signs from the harbor in the little town of Arbroath.

A succinctly compelling reason not to feed the birds.

I like how the person appears to be contemplating the jump. They’re even leaning into it. I’m more afraid of that wavy water.

I like this approach to the problem.

Something very bad had to happen to get the car to this point. Notice how the water apparently isn’t so deep when you’re in a car.

I was happy to see this amazing property of car/water interaction, as we had a car this time and spent much of our time driving on narrow, windy, roads along various coasts. Thankfully, we never had to test the car’s ability to float. Much more on that to come.