traveling

Travel went okay, for the most part. Pretty smooth on the way over. No trouble with security. Our line at Heathrow went pretty quick. Driving in Edinburgh sucked. The map we had was useless, and there was so much road construction that the GPS wasn't much help. I don't know why my dad thought the place had parking. Neither their website nor Expedia says anything about parking. There's only one car park in all of downtown Edinburgh, and we couldn't find it by car. We ended up parking about a mile away, on the street. Fortunately, it was free parking there on Sunday. So after we got situated, we walked the Royal Mile and found some whisky. It ended up being about a 33 hour day. It took a few days to get caught up on sleep, but nothing serious.

Coming back, at EDI, the security line my dad went through made everyone take their shoes off. He said the guy next to him said, "I've flown every week for [some number of] years, and I've never had to take my shoes off!" I went through just fine, but that was the last time. At Heathrow, I had to step aside so they could search my backpack, since they discovered my little bottle of hand sanitizer. First time that happened. Then, we had to go through a checkpoint at our gate. The guy at the door sent us to a girl who asked us the usual immigrations questions, "how long were you here, where did you go?" And then I was told to step aside for a bag search and patdown. When we got back into the states, at immigration, the little slip I had printed out for me after the passport scan, had a big X across it, so I had to go through a separate line. Not sure what the point of that was.

And then our bags were waiting for us, intact with whisky. And I didn't have to pay duties on any of it.

We had some delays coming back. Our plane was about 20 minutes late, departing from Heathrow. Then we had to fly a little slowly, due to turbulence. Then we to circle O'Hare for a while due to traffic. Then we had to wait for our shuttle from the airport for an hour. After half an hour I called and asked where they were, and they said there was another traveler (on our same flight) who was still going through customs. We found that hard to believe. My dad said he was probably sitting in a restaurant. After another half hour, they gave up waiting for him and took us home.

illness

I often get sick on trips. I usually pick up something on the planes. I come down with something about two days after flying. This time, I totally forgot to get a flu shot. And I didn't pick up the bug on the plane. My dad started to feel under the weather on the second tuesday (he'd had a flu shot). His head hurt, and then he got a bad cough. A couple of days later I started feeling crappy. My throat started hurting. Then I was feeling weak. Then my ears started to hurt and my sinuses got stuffed up. I spent the rest of the trip blowing my nose. My ears caused me pain on the flight into London. The first night I was really sick, I couldn't get to sleep for a couple of hours. I slept better the second night I was sick, and the next day I was feeling a bit better. I'm still not back to normal, but yesterday (a 23.5 hour day) I wasn't too bad.

food in Scotland

First, there were the breakfasts. Full cooked breakfast. Every day. Every single day. Fried egg with runny yolk. Pork sausage link, bacon (like Canadian bacon, or ham), baked tomato halves. Usually, a hash brown patty. once, haggis. Three times, black pudding (pucks of blood sausage, looked like brownies, tasted like haggis). Often, mushrooms. Orange juice, coffee and tea. Many places had cold cereal, yogurt, apples and bananas. A few places had stewed prunes and grapefruit sections. That's pretty much it. The best breakfast of the trip was at the B&B on Orkney. The menu offered smoked fish, so I accepted. It was a larger piece than I expected, and then the full cooked breakfast on top of it, was larger than usual - two sausage links, plus a big puck of black pudding (the first time I had seen it).



My dad wanted to eat cheap and light all the time (which was fine, usually), and only Scottish (I would have liked Indian, once or twice, but he neither likes Indian, nor wanted to eat "foreign" food in Scotland). So we usually had sandwiches. They always came with chips. I won't be able to eat French fries again for a long time. We had real dinners three times, I think, and always at my suggestion. My dad's favorite meal of the trip was haggis-stuffed chicken breast with whisky sauce. I had seafood a few times. Salmon, scallops, smoked haddock. Local cheeses (mostly cheddars), including on Orkney.

And I didn't gain any weight on the trip!

My dad and I were talking about the foods we're going to eat when we get home, that we haven't had in a while. Pizza, chocolate. I've been home for about 16 hours, and have had pizza, chocolate chip cookies, a Pop Tart, my cereal and cranberry juice. I think I'll have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on homemade bread for lunch. And I'll enjoy dinner every night this week. Oh, I want spaghetti.

I forgot to mention the ginger beer. I'd always wanted to try it, and I love it. I had it at almost every opportunity. If you like the hot, spicy ginger flavor, you'll probably like ginger beer. Besides that, I usually had a pint of cider (like Strongbow) in the pubs. Or whisky.

forgot

I forgot to pack a few things.

My medication for my eczema. My rashes got pretty bad in the second week.
Business cards. I even wrote my Flickr address on the backs, before I left.
A note pad. I saw one for sale for six dollars, early in the trip, but that was too much. I should have bought it anyway, since I wanted to take takes notes at the distilleries.
Lip balm.

Lost: one UK power adapter, and one power cord. The cord was for both the laptop and camera battery charger. Fortunately, that was near the end of the trip, so neither ran out of power before it was time to come home. The laptop had just barely enough power to get checked in for the flight the day before we came home.

Taken, but unused: tripod, sketchbook. Not too bad.