Subject: Scotland (part 1 of 10) Date: Tue, 30 May 95 11:43:37 -0700 ------- Take a normally unclaustrophobic person, buckle them into a seat for 10 hours straight with one break for the restroom, and you get a claustrophobic person ready to just explode. Well... at least you would if you didn't feed them food that was actually quite excellent and a couple of movies that can capture their imagination even if they can't hear the dialog over the noise of the engine, and give them various people to talk to and with who are quite interesting and rather desperately friendly. On top of that, don't start the flight until after they've already put a full day of work in, and shift time on them by eight hours, so that 4am becomes noon and they get tired enough and disoriented enough to be quite passive. I'm presently in the Heathrow airport, feeling quite passive and nearly two hours early for the flight to Glasgow. In fact I'm tired and grimy enough to want nothing more than a little bit of tea, a good shower and a soft bed... or even a clean bathroom. At least John's ecstatic about all the Land Rovers he gets to look at and the British magazine he's found that's full of Rovers. The movies on the plane were _Immortal Beloved_ and _Legends of the Fall_. Dinner was medallions of beef in gravy with veggies, a seafood salad, a chocolate torte, and pretty much anything you wanted to drink. Sadly they played Immortal Beloved first, and while I had fun catching strains of various Beethoven pieces (nearly all of them played far too fast for even my taste and my piano teacher used to call me a wild horse trying to stay in harness), the movie wasn't that interesting. John went to sleep during it. I only managed to catch the beginning and ending of the Fall, just enough to realize just how cute Brad Pitt is behind bars, just how marvelous an actor Anthony Hopkins is, and realize that I still didn't have a clue as to the plot of the movie. I'll have to rent the video. I guess I've always been of the philosophy that if you screw your body up royally before you travel, then by the time you actually manage to find a bed for the first night, you'll be so tired that you'll have absolutely no problems getting to sleep, and if you can get a good night's sleep the first night, then the rest will follow. It feels awful *doing* it for the first day of travel, but I've mostly been pleased with the results, before. I think, though, that it does mess with my outlook on life until I'm actually through with that first night of sleep . As we were getting packed into the plane I commented to John, "At least sardines have the mercy of being dead, first." Part of the mental state is the fact that I am in the middle of a project at work that has a close deadline and I'm not nearly done with as much as I ought to have done in order to hit that deadline. For the first time I'm the one with work that needs doing, instead of John. Another part of it is that was kinda decided on this trip just six weeks ago, and, as normal, actually, we haven't *had* the time to think about this trip until the day or two before we actually were to leave. Last week I also had a killer trip to Cleveland, OH, where we flow into the city, arriving at 10pm (after *everything* had shut down for the night), having to get up to work at 8am Eastern time, which was still 5am my body time, working all day straight with just a half an hour break for lunch, only ending around 4pm. Our flight home was at 6pm, so that was that. And when I got home I was completely wiped out, so much so that the Friday afterwards was pretty useless. I've been playing catch up ever since with sleep, work, energy and attitude. I also found out just how hard it is, in some ways, to leave all my friends on the Net, knowing that I'll be pretty much gone from the Net for a week and a half. I seem to have an astonishingly large amount of support from the Net, especially from Mark and Flynn, Johanna and Kelly and Trip as well. I already miss folks. Kinda interesting to see how much they've entwined into my life. I also spent most of the week before the trip getting mail from folks in the U.K. about how to contact them while I'm here; and saying 'See you later's to everyone. I definitely do not want to get on the plane to Glasgow at this particular moment. Not looking forward to another hour on a plane. One interesting thing is that the gates have stands that sell bar stuff and bakery stuff and lunch stuff, and there is actually wait staff that comes around and cleans up the trays after people are done with them. It's kinda startling to have people with glasses of beer all over the gate area, especially after being used to the airport bars in the US that restrict all alcohol to the bars. Kinda cool that all the dishes are real dishes and not just disposable stuff. A whole lot less trash and automatic reuse. The layout of the airport is really confusing, though, what with four different sets of gates that are completely disconnected from each other and some of them are only reachable by bus from others. Customs is kinda weird, too. We were expecting to go through the whole rigmarole in Heathrow, but we only went through the passport stuff there and will be going through all the final customs check when we get to Glasgow and our baggage comes off the plane. Astonishing what simply having a place to hang your stuff and pee can do to ones attitude. A *huge* thunderstorm came in as we finally found a nice B&B and it's raining hard, and the storm is rather beautiful. The countryside around here is rolling, gentle, *green* farmlands... and the houses and fields look a bit like northern England. Oh, wow... the 'rain' is actually a downpour of 'rain and very wet snow'. Wow... snow in May. John's happy, but the business guy in the room the floor down is not. Turned out there was no final custom's check and the flight to Glasgow wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared it'd be. I slept nearly the entire flight, until the tea tray went by with sandwiches (three kinds, one turkey, one tuna, and one with cheese and an unidentifiable sticky sweet textured substance), and a scone with clotted cream and strawberry preserves. There was also plenty of hot tea with sugar and uht milk. Yum. Sleeping all of the flight really helped make it short, though it was confusing for a bit when I heard the pilot talking about arrival time, about making sure that your safety belt fastened while the sign was on and then feeling the engines *push*. It was actually the beginning of the flight rather than the end. After landing in Glasgow we just went to the normal baggage claim, got our stuff and headed for the rental cars. LAUGHTER!! We got a *tiny* car that could almost be a mini, except that this car actually pretends that it has back seats! We flipped them forward a bit to accommodate our suitcases, piled in and John drove off. That's when I realized that, yet again, much of travel is adjusting to That Which Is Different and doing it *quickly*. Both John and I got cramps in our hands from gripping things way too tight during the initial search for the B&B that his mom and dad had stayed at when they'd visited Darvel, which is just south of Glasgow and is the site around which quite a few of John's mom's relatives have congregated. With some asking about and John having to deal with Scottish accents so thick he had problems understanding them, we found the B&B. It turned out to be full, sadly, so there was no way we could stay there. They told us to go to the nearest big town, named Kilmarnock, and look for a B&B in town. We circled the town a couple of times, once to look for the information kiosk, which was closed. We wandered around and found a B&B with a lot of cars in front, and when John found that it was filled, they recommended the Burnished Hotel, which was just down the main street. We got a top floor room with a skylight and got to see the snow/rain storm come blowing in on a really BLACK cloud. We went out in the storm to find dinner and found a small neighborhood pub across the street from a Safeway and John had a steak and ale pie while I had liver and bacon. John also had an ale while I had a ginger beer. Yum. We also talked through possible plans for the week. More like possible scenarios. The Safeway proved to be far too tempting. Ginger beer, lemonade (the fizzy kind), flake bars, 'plain' chocolate covered digestive biscuits and HobNobs are things that we just don't get much of in the U.S., so we stocked up for the road trip. Ginger beer in the U.K. has a lot more bite than ginger ale does in the U.S.. Lemonade in the U.K. is less sweet and is carbonated. Only the British Limited Cadbury's make Flake Bars. I've found them in Canada and here. They're a really flaky, crumble, light chocolate bar. hobnobs are oatmeal cookies with a very particular texture. The grocery stores here have huge stocks of 'sweet and savory biscuits' along with dozens of different kinds of small cakes for teas. Those are the kinds of cookies I can't find in the U.S., though I can find some of them in Canadian British Columbia. The one thing that I really regretted forgetting to bring to the U.K. was several pound-plus packages of Oreos. I'd planned on bringing those with me, but forgot to go by the Safeway at home to buy them. Ah well, the common consensus had been that the Canadian Oreos were better, anyway, so I'll just have to ship them again. Not a really big problem. Then we went back to the B&B and crashed. Totally. Breakfast is at 8 to 9, and we'll probably sleep 11-12 hours and plan everything out in the morning, calling everyone over here. The view out the skylight is of a tree and the sky above the city. Really neat to watch the rapid changes as the storm blew through. We also watched TV to figure out what the weather's going to be like for the next couple of days in order to do our planning. It's definitely more important to sleep, first... then do the showering and like in the morning. ----- end of 1 of 10 ----- Copyright 1995 by Phyllis L. Rostykus. All rights reserved.