Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Saturday August 12,--Wales/Scotland
On Saturday morning early we took the Metro to the train station and departed for Calsis, France where we boarded a Sea France ferry and went across the English Channel to Dover England. We took a taxi from the train station to the ferry terminal. After we got our tickets and boarded we went into the cafeteria and found a corner place where we could stack our luggage and took turns going through the lines and getting a good English breakfast.
After we had eaten we went on deck and watched for the shore of England. We were told that on a clear day you can see both France and England.
Mary and I talked about whether the French ever got envious because we were crossing the English Channel instead of the French Channel. The trip only takes about an hour and a half and there is a time zone change which means only a half hour has passed on the clock in the crossing. All my life I have heard and read about the white cliffs of Dover. When we sited land on this cloudy drizzly day the first thing we saw were the white cliffs.
They are real pure sand stone and the really are visible for a great distance even with no sun. When we got off the boat and cleared the immigration stuff we were on our way to London. Mary is always disappointed when anyone looks at our passports and does not stamp them.
The train station is a short bus ride from the ferry terminal. We arrived there and got our train trip arranged and had time to sit and relax a bit before boarding the train. The train ride to London took about and hour and forty five minutes. We arrived in London at Victoria Station and had to change to Euston Station to get our train going to Wales. We had an easy trip with only one train change in Crewe, just before we got to the Wales border. We met a nice lady on the train who makes a living traveling to race tracks and betting on horses. She evidently did some kind of reporting back to the company she worked for on the experiences she had in her travels. It a tough job, but somebody has to do it, I guess?? Anyway, we enjoyed our visit with her and an older couple who were from Wales and were returning home. The lady in the couple told Mary about prepaid phone cards. She had several of them which had been given to her so she gave Mary one. We got off the train at Crewe and they all continued on.
We had only a few minutes to make the change and when we were on the train and seated I realized that I did not have my fanny pack. I keep my passport, wallet and cell phone in it as well as some odds and end money that I get in change. We grabbed our luggage and got off the train. I went in and talked to the lady at the information counter. After I explained the problem, she called the next station down the line. The met the train and went to the car that we had been riding on. The lady who gave Mary the phone card was getting off the train to turn my pack in. We had to get on the next train and take a half hour ride down and get it. They were able to route us so we only had to double back about ten miles then cut across on another track which got us back on our line. We took a moment and thanked God for honest people!
We arrived at Preststyn, Wales after the regular registration desk had closed and we had to check into our accommodations at the bar.
They had live music and they were having a great time in there, but we passed on the dancing because we were weary. We stayed in a really neat place. It was separate cabins and they were comfortable, clean and dry. There were not many dry places in the UK that week. It rained every day we were there. We loafed all day Sunday. We did take about a four mile walk in the afternoon between showers. We did get drizzled on but not too bad.
We stopped at a grocery store and bought some stuff and found out where a laundry mat was so we could do laundry on Monday.
We had to go to the public library to have access to the internet. We spent a couple of hours there on Monday and Tuesday. Prestatyn is an old lead mining town which now is a tourist trap on the shore of the Irish Sea.
We enjoyed the village, looking in shops and second hand book stores. Mary bargained with a guy and traded some our paperbacks to him; we gave him two of ours for one of his. That lightened my load because I carry the books in my bag. We haven’t bought a book on this trip. We left home with about six and we have been reading them and trading them at places we stay and at used book shops.
Our hotel had a health club and spa which we got to use free as guests. We didn’t use anything except the steam room, sauna and whirlpool. I used those about every day we were there.
Bill, I met a man who was a few years older than I am and I wish you had been there to hear what he had to say. He came into the sauna and I was there. We spoke and when heard my accent he put out his hand and asked me to shake with an old friend of the US from WWII. He said that his country, England, and most of Europe owed their existence to the US. He got very excited when he told me that he could not stand to hear people being critical of our President today and calling him a cowboy. His position was that you stand by your friends and although he did not agree with everything his PM did, he was proud of him for standing by the US. He said that the people who complained and raised a fuss just had never had to live through hard times brought on by an unchallenged tyrant. I do believe that the man was a patriot. There was a good restaurant where we took a few meals. We had a traditional English breakfast and I tasted black pudding. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was so when the server came back Mary asked and he told us it was blood pudding. I didn’t finish it; however it wasn’t all that bad when I didn’t know what I was eating.
We had to split the week between Wales and Scotland, so on Wednesday we got a train to Edinburgh, Scotland. I think it was about three and a half hours. Not a long ride. We got a lot of pictures of some beautiful farm land with cows and sheep inside stone fences.
We were riding with a lady who was going to visit her Son and his family and she knew the name of every stream and bridge we crossed and a lot of history of the towns we passed through.
I didn’t take notes and she told us far too much to remember. In fact I have about worn my remember out. I think they call it sensory overload. I have taken in so much information in the last two months I can’t keep it all straight if I don’t write it down. Couple of things I did take note of because of their beauty. At Dundee we crossed the Tay River on a beautiful bridge in a very scenic area. We traveled for a long distance along the coast of the North Sea. There are some pretty pictures of the cliffs and rocks along the rugged shore. I’m not sure what a Firth is but we crossed the fourth bridge on the Firth. I think it sounds very Scottish. We also passed through the railroad station where you would get off the train for the St. Andrews Old Course. I’d have enjoyed playing that course, but it would probably be hard to hitch hike back from Scotland to Georgia and I probably would be broke after I paid whatever it would cost at the course.
When we arrived at Edinburgh we found out that we were there for the second week of Festival. We had come to the city without any reservation for overnight accommodations. We went looking for a tourist info office. They make room reservations for folks as foolish as us. We found instead a store front in the train station for www.lastminutehotels.com. I didn’t know they had stores. The girl checked hostels and they were all full. She checked B&B’s and found us one. It was some distance from the city center, but it was right on a bus line and no problem to reach. It was very nice and we enjoyed the experience. We had dinner at an outdoor restaurant down the street and had a wonderful breakfast at our place the next morning. They gave us some information about city bus tours and early the next morning we went back into the city and took a tour.
The tour originated at the Waverly Bridge next to the train station on Princes Street. Directly in front of us as we boarded the bus was an imposing monument to Sir Walter Scott.
It commemorated his career as an author with 64 statutes on the monument depicting characters from his works. As we progressed away from the Bridge and our tour began, we saw Author’s Seat. Bill had told us about climbing this hill on his visit to Edinburgh.
We passed the Old Colton Cemetery and saw a statue of Abraham Lincoln, stated to be the first outside the US. It was erected to honor men from Scotland who died in the American Civil War.
At the Palace of Holyroodhouse, which is the residence of the Queen in Scotland there is a small gate house out by the street which is referred to as Queen Mary’s Bathhouse as Mary is a strong part of the turbulent past of the Palace and Scotland. Today the Palace is used for State Ceremonies and official entertaining.
The Parliament House is a striking contrast to the Old Towne. It was the Building of the year in the year it was completed; so named by whatever architectural group announces such things.
The Royal Mile is a stretch of road which runs from the Palace of Hollroodhouse up the hill to the Castle of Edinburgh.
It is lined with historic buildings which date back to the early stages of Edinburgh’s history and still shows evidence of the wall which protected the city.
Mary and I walked back to the Castle to take pictures and perhaps take a tour of the castle itself.
The Forecourt was taken up with temporary grandstands which would hold 30,000 people. Every night they had a military tattoo which is sold out for years in advance. It is evidently the biggest attraction of the festival.
The Castle houses the Scottish Crown Jewels and the Destiny Stone in the Royal Apartments and these are available to public view on the tour. The lines were so long and we had allowed so little time to be in Edinburgh that we just left. We did see St. Margaret’s Chapel which is on the Chapel grounds and is the oldest building in the city dating from the 12th century.
We visited the Grass Market, the site of the public well and the gallows which was the site of public hangings.
The oldest pub in Edinburgh is here and outside is a statue of a small dog. The story is that a policeman owned the dog. The officer and the dog guarded the livestock in Grass Market. The policeman died and for the next fourteen years the dog stood vigil at the grave of his master. Being known by most of the people in the neighborhood he was fed and cared for. Each night, however, the dog slept on the grave.
The statue was erected when the dog died and was buried next to his master. We also saw the buildings of Edinburgh University which is the sixth oldest University in Great Britain, founded in 1585. We saw the home of John Knox, the religious reformer from the 1400’s.
We passed from Old Towne to New Towne where the initial buildings were put up in the 1760”s in St Andrews Square. We saw the birthplace of Alexander Graham Bell, also Joseph Lister’s home. Many of the buildings had what our guide refers to as Pitts Portraits; these are windows that have been filled in because Prime Minister William Pitt placed a tax on houses according to the number of windows.
Each period of history in every city we visit has stories that make it special and helps us hold it in our memory.
We went to an internet café before we left the city and checked our email and banking. In the afternoon we caught a train to Aberdeen and then on to Inverness.
We walked a lot in Inverness. It is a small town in the Scottish Highlands and we saw most of it. The purpose of the trip beyond Edinburgh was a rail tour of the highlands. Inverness is just the place we decided to stop for the night.
We had a considerable amount of trouble finding a place to sleep on this Thursday night. We only brought a small overnight type bag with us so we didn’t have a lot of luggage to carry.
When we arrived we left the train station and walked to a hostel which we located nearby. We found no vacancy there and the lady told us the other hostels in the town were full and we needed to check the B&B’s. She directed us to a section of town across the Ness River which had a lot of Bed and Breakfast and Guesthouses.
We must have passed fifty of these places with no vacancy signs up. We finally gave up and started looking at full service hotels only to find them full as well. The lady at the second one we went to said they had no rooms. Her co-worker said that she had just heard that there was a vacancy in a guest house just around the corner... We got her to call and ask for it to be held for us. Evidently the lady who owned the guesthouse was a friend of the lady at the hotel.
When we got there she said that while she was on the phone someone came to the door asking for the room. She had written a booking down wrong and the people were not coming until the next day. She had had her no vacancy sign up all day by mistake. We might have literally gotten the last room in that town.
We had planned to do some sight seeing on Friday morning, but we got up and it was raining and dreary, so we got on a train and headed back to Wales. We got to Wales in the evening and got good nights sleep because we had to check out on Saturday and head to our next weeks accommodations.
On Saturday morning early we took the Metro to the train station and departed for Calsis, France where we boarded a Sea France ferry and went across the English Channel to Dover England. We took a taxi from the train station to the ferry terminal. After we got our tickets and boarded we went into the cafeteria and found a corner place where we could stack our luggage and took turns going through the lines and getting a good English breakfast.
After we had eaten we went on deck and watched for the shore of England. We were told that on a clear day you can see both France and England.
Mary and I talked about whether the French ever got envious because we were crossing the English Channel instead of the French Channel. The trip only takes about an hour and a half and there is a time zone change which means only a half hour has passed on the clock in the crossing. All my life I have heard and read about the white cliffs of Dover. When we sited land on this cloudy drizzly day the first thing we saw were the white cliffs.
They are real pure sand stone and the really are visible for a great distance even with no sun. When we got off the boat and cleared the immigration stuff we were on our way to London. Mary is always disappointed when anyone looks at our passports and does not stamp them.
The train station is a short bus ride from the ferry terminal. We arrived there and got our train trip arranged and had time to sit and relax a bit before boarding the train. The train ride to London took about and hour and forty five minutes. We arrived in London at Victoria Station and had to change to Euston Station to get our train going to Wales. We had an easy trip with only one train change in Crewe, just before we got to the Wales border. We met a nice lady on the train who makes a living traveling to race tracks and betting on horses. She evidently did some kind of reporting back to the company she worked for on the experiences she had in her travels. It a tough job, but somebody has to do it, I guess?? Anyway, we enjoyed our visit with her and an older couple who were from Wales and were returning home. The lady in the couple told Mary about prepaid phone cards. She had several of them which had been given to her so she gave Mary one. We got off the train at Crewe and they all continued on.
We had only a few minutes to make the change and when we were on the train and seated I realized that I did not have my fanny pack. I keep my passport, wallet and cell phone in it as well as some odds and end money that I get in change. We grabbed our luggage and got off the train. I went in and talked to the lady at the information counter. After I explained the problem, she called the next station down the line. The met the train and went to the car that we had been riding on. The lady who gave Mary the phone card was getting off the train to turn my pack in. We had to get on the next train and take a half hour ride down and get it. They were able to route us so we only had to double back about ten miles then cut across on another track which got us back on our line. We took a moment and thanked God for honest people!
We arrived at Preststyn, Wales after the regular registration desk had closed and we had to check into our accommodations at the bar.
They had live music and they were having a great time in there, but we passed on the dancing because we were weary. We stayed in a really neat place. It was separate cabins and they were comfortable, clean and dry. There were not many dry places in the UK that week. It rained every day we were there. We loafed all day Sunday. We did take about a four mile walk in the afternoon between showers. We did get drizzled on but not too bad.
We stopped at a grocery store and bought some stuff and found out where a laundry mat was so we could do laundry on Monday.
We had to go to the public library to have access to the internet. We spent a couple of hours there on Monday and Tuesday. Prestatyn is an old lead mining town which now is a tourist trap on the shore of the Irish Sea.
We enjoyed the village, looking in shops and second hand book stores. Mary bargained with a guy and traded some our paperbacks to him; we gave him two of ours for one of his. That lightened my load because I carry the books in my bag. We haven’t bought a book on this trip. We left home with about six and we have been reading them and trading them at places we stay and at used book shops.
Our hotel had a health club and spa which we got to use free as guests. We didn’t use anything except the steam room, sauna and whirlpool. I used those about every day we were there.
Bill, I met a man who was a few years older than I am and I wish you had been there to hear what he had to say. He came into the sauna and I was there. We spoke and when heard my accent he put out his hand and asked me to shake with an old friend of the US from WWII. He said that his country, England, and most of Europe owed their existence to the US. He got very excited when he told me that he could not stand to hear people being critical of our President today and calling him a cowboy. His position was that you stand by your friends and although he did not agree with everything his PM did, he was proud of him for standing by the US. He said that the people who complained and raised a fuss just had never had to live through hard times brought on by an unchallenged tyrant. I do believe that the man was a patriot. There was a good restaurant where we took a few meals. We had a traditional English breakfast and I tasted black pudding. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was so when the server came back Mary asked and he told us it was blood pudding. I didn’t finish it; however it wasn’t all that bad when I didn’t know what I was eating.
We had to split the week between Wales and Scotland, so on Wednesday we got a train to Edinburgh, Scotland. I think it was about three and a half hours. Not a long ride. We got a lot of pictures of some beautiful farm land with cows and sheep inside stone fences.
We were riding with a lady who was going to visit her Son and his family and she knew the name of every stream and bridge we crossed and a lot of history of the towns we passed through.
I didn’t take notes and she told us far too much to remember. In fact I have about worn my remember out. I think they call it sensory overload. I have taken in so much information in the last two months I can’t keep it all straight if I don’t write it down. Couple of things I did take note of because of their beauty. At Dundee we crossed the Tay River on a beautiful bridge in a very scenic area. We traveled for a long distance along the coast of the North Sea. There are some pretty pictures of the cliffs and rocks along the rugged shore. I’m not sure what a Firth is but we crossed the fourth bridge on the Firth. I think it sounds very Scottish. We also passed through the railroad station where you would get off the train for the St. Andrews Old Course. I’d have enjoyed playing that course, but it would probably be hard to hitch hike back from Scotland to Georgia and I probably would be broke after I paid whatever it would cost at the course.
When we arrived at Edinburgh we found out that we were there for the second week of Festival. We had come to the city without any reservation for overnight accommodations. We went looking for a tourist info office. They make room reservations for folks as foolish as us. We found instead a store front in the train station for www.lastminutehotels.com. I didn’t know they had stores. The girl checked hostels and they were all full. She checked B&B’s and found us one. It was some distance from the city center, but it was right on a bus line and no problem to reach. It was very nice and we enjoyed the experience. We had dinner at an outdoor restaurant down the street and had a wonderful breakfast at our place the next morning. They gave us some information about city bus tours and early the next morning we went back into the city and took a tour.
The tour originated at the Waverly Bridge next to the train station on Princes Street. Directly in front of us as we boarded the bus was an imposing monument to Sir Walter Scott.
It commemorated his career as an author with 64 statutes on the monument depicting characters from his works. As we progressed away from the Bridge and our tour began, we saw Author’s Seat. Bill had told us about climbing this hill on his visit to Edinburgh.
We passed the Old Colton Cemetery and saw a statue of Abraham Lincoln, stated to be the first outside the US. It was erected to honor men from Scotland who died in the American Civil War.
At the Palace of Holyroodhouse, which is the residence of the Queen in Scotland there is a small gate house out by the street which is referred to as Queen Mary’s Bathhouse as Mary is a strong part of the turbulent past of the Palace and Scotland. Today the Palace is used for State Ceremonies and official entertaining.
The Parliament House is a striking contrast to the Old Towne. It was the Building of the year in the year it was completed; so named by whatever architectural group announces such things.
The Royal Mile is a stretch of road which runs from the Palace of Hollroodhouse up the hill to the Castle of Edinburgh.
It is lined with historic buildings which date back to the early stages of Edinburgh’s history and still shows evidence of the wall which protected the city.
Mary and I walked back to the Castle to take pictures and perhaps take a tour of the castle itself.
The Forecourt was taken up with temporary grandstands which would hold 30,000 people. Every night they had a military tattoo which is sold out for years in advance. It is evidently the biggest attraction of the festival.
The Castle houses the Scottish Crown Jewels and the Destiny Stone in the Royal Apartments and these are available to public view on the tour. The lines were so long and we had allowed so little time to be in Edinburgh that we just left. We did see St. Margaret’s Chapel which is on the Chapel grounds and is the oldest building in the city dating from the 12th century.
We visited the Grass Market, the site of the public well and the gallows which was the site of public hangings.
The oldest pub in Edinburgh is here and outside is a statue of a small dog. The story is that a policeman owned the dog. The officer and the dog guarded the livestock in Grass Market. The policeman died and for the next fourteen years the dog stood vigil at the grave of his master. Being known by most of the people in the neighborhood he was fed and cared for. Each night, however, the dog slept on the grave.
The statue was erected when the dog died and was buried next to his master. We also saw the buildings of Edinburgh University which is the sixth oldest University in Great Britain, founded in 1585. We saw the home of John Knox, the religious reformer from the 1400’s.
We passed from Old Towne to New Towne where the initial buildings were put up in the 1760”s in St Andrews Square. We saw the birthplace of Alexander Graham Bell, also Joseph Lister’s home. Many of the buildings had what our guide refers to as Pitts Portraits; these are windows that have been filled in because Prime Minister William Pitt placed a tax on houses according to the number of windows.
Each period of history in every city we visit has stories that make it special and helps us hold it in our memory.
We went to an internet café before we left the city and checked our email and banking. In the afternoon we caught a train to Aberdeen and then on to Inverness.
We walked a lot in Inverness. It is a small town in the Scottish Highlands and we saw most of it. The purpose of the trip beyond Edinburgh was a rail tour of the highlands. Inverness is just the place we decided to stop for the night.
We had a considerable amount of trouble finding a place to sleep on this Thursday night. We only brought a small overnight type bag with us so we didn’t have a lot of luggage to carry.
When we arrived we left the train station and walked to a hostel which we located nearby. We found no vacancy there and the lady told us the other hostels in the town were full and we needed to check the B&B’s. She directed us to a section of town across the Ness River which had a lot of Bed and Breakfast and Guesthouses.
We must have passed fifty of these places with no vacancy signs up. We finally gave up and started looking at full service hotels only to find them full as well. The lady at the second one we went to said they had no rooms. Her co-worker said that she had just heard that there was a vacancy in a guest house just around the corner... We got her to call and ask for it to be held for us. Evidently the lady who owned the guesthouse was a friend of the lady at the hotel.
When we got there she said that while she was on the phone someone came to the door asking for the room. She had written a booking down wrong and the people were not coming until the next day. She had had her no vacancy sign up all day by mistake. We might have literally gotten the last room in that town.
We had planned to do some sight seeing on Friday morning, but we got up and it was raining and dreary, so we got on a train and headed back to Wales. We got to Wales in the evening and got good nights sleep because we had to check out on Saturday and head to our next weeks accommodations.
