"We could make it up to Scotland for a couple of days..."
"If we leave on a Friday and don't come back until a Sunday, we could maybe hop over to the continent for a day or two..."
And so on and so forth.
It reminded me of the time my Dad suggested to my Mom (entirely in jest) that, over a 4-day weekend, they could drive from Salt Lake to Seattle, cut down through the Columbia Gorge and Portland, before making a quick stop in San Francisco on the way home. Without hesitation, Mom jumped at the offer, only to discover that no reasonable person could take such an offer seriously.
We decided that, rather than try to stretch our two-week trip to cover all that we wanted, we would just do one final hurrah. One "blow-the-bank", "we'll figure out the finances when we get back" , "student loan money is on the way", six-week extravaganza. While this was probably the most irresponsible decision we've made in our marriage (I should actually call it the most irresponsible decision I've made - Jenny is far too responsible), I have absolutely no regrets. We needed the 3 and a half weeks on the continent to do it justice. Even that was obviously pushing it. But with only a little more than 2 weeks in Britain, and so much to see, I knew things were going to be a little tight on the front end. To illustrate:
We land at 2:00 pm, at Luton Airport -- an hour North of London. We run to the front of the passport line, and catch a shuttle to the rental car desk, which puts us on the road at 3:00. We have one shot at seeing Stonehenge, and it closes in 4 hours. It's roughly 2 hours south of us. Once we see it, we have to drive 7 hours North to Liverpool, where we'll spend the night. The next day we have to see at least 1 or 2 sights in Liverpool before putting in 11 hours of driving to arrive at our B&B in Portree on the Isle of Skye.
Let's go back to the rental car parking lot at Luton. As we get in the car (on the "wrong" sides), Jenny asks me if I'm up to the challenge of driving in England. "No big deal," I scoff, as I feel around for the ignition. After a few hiccups, we pull out of the parking lot and onto the frontage road. Everything is going along smoothly, and we look at each other, nodding. "This isn't as bad as people said it would be." When our eyes return to the road, a semi truck has come around the bend and is approaching us (head-on) in our lane. Jenny has her hand over her mouth at this point. Calmly, I move into the left lane and proceed to enter the freeway. While I am accustomed to driving swiftly in the left-most freeway lane in the States (i.e. the fast lane), I decide that I should take things a little more slowly here. I drift over to the right lane and slow down to a cool 50 MPH. I wanna break these freeways in before I put the gas on. After a few minutes, multiple cars are passing me, honking, throwing their hands in the air, etc. I look in my rear-view mirror, and a man in a BMW is waving his hand as if to say, "Get the @*!% out of the way." It dawns on me that I am doing 50 MPH in the British fast lane. I put on my blinker, which elicits clapping from the man in the BMW and a female in the passenger seat, and I bashfully move over to the appropriate lane.
Following our freeway fiascos, we make it to Stonehenge. I really don't even know what to say about the place. It is just crazy. People bringing stones in from miles away to built a religious calendar/altar/etc. Very cool. Very strange. Glad we saw it. The audioguides around our necks were informative, although I remember very little of what they said.
We did our best to get to Bath in time to see the Roman Baths, but alas, they were closed. Bath is the Jane Austen town, and it does a better job than any other town, city, or village of blending the words "quaint" and "regal". So, what does a couple do when the purpose for their stop is no longer a viable option? They have bowls of noodles at Wagamamas and wander around through the streets before joining the unabashedly touristy Bizarre Bath tour. The noodles hit the spot, and the tour came highly recommended from that travel oracle, Rick Steves. In fact, there were multiple citizens of Bath who joined us on the tour. While the tour took us around the town, it was the comedic value that brought tourists and locals together. Our guide walked through the streets blindfolded, mildly assaulted people walking along the sidewalks, performed magic tricks, and comparted dry English wit and over-the-top slapstick. When he initially asked for a volunteer, Jenny, who was standing behind me, lifted my hand up. How convenient. So, in front of 100 people, I mimicked everything our guide did for two minutes. If I could keep up with him, he would give me back the 8 pounds I had paid to join the tour. He handed me a glass half full of water. He drank. I drank. He put the glass through his legs. I put the glass through my legs. And so on and so forth. At the end of the routine, he spit the water back into the glass. He had been hiding it in his cheek the whole time. I was finished. I had no water in my mouth. Eager to win the 8 pounds, however, I gathered some saliva together and spit into the glass. I'm not usually that brilliant, but this won me applause and 8 pounds. The tour, which Jenny recommended after the Roman Baths were closed, ended up being one of the highlights of our day and our entire trip. In the picture below, our guide is putting a stuffed rabbit into a straight-jacket, and then into a box, before throwing it into the river. Magically, it reappered, floating on top of the water.
We left Bath on a high. Everything was great. We had dined on bowls of noodles; we had laughed through the streets of Bath for 2 hours, and we were now on the road, driving through small British towns as the sun set over the hills.
We arrived in Liverpool at 1:00 a.m., and checked into the Premier Inn, overlooking Albert Dock. Albert Dock was the place from which thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of Brits and Europeans came to America, including many 19th century Mormon converts. Our room (very cool, lots of exposed brick and other stylistic flourishes) overlooked the dock, and we peeked out the window, at the quiet water.
We started the next day by taking full advantage of Premier Inn's English buffet breakfast: sausage, tomatoes, beans, eggs, fruit and ham. We visited the Liverpool Maritime Museum, and enjoyed walking through a recreation of a 19th century dock being prepared for a day of departures. The sounds of porters taking luggage and goods on board ships played overhead, as we walked through the dimly lit "dock." We also enjoyed seeing artifacts from the Titanic and information on the slave trade. I hadn't realized that the United States accumulated a relatively small number slaves compared to other countries such as France, Brazil, and the Caribbean. At one point in the museum, as we were walking through an exhibit on life as a homosexual sailor, Jenny mentioned that she needed to use the restroom. She handed me her purse, and walked off. Needless to say, I felt a little out of place.
Eager to make it to Portree by nightfall, we left Liverpool via the downtown district. We drove North and stopped at several picturesque points along the way. First, we went to Hadrian's Wall, which was essentially the Northern border of the Roman Empire around the time of Christ. It absolutely blows me away to think that the Romans had such an empire at that time. The wall is still intact, and has fortifications every few miles, which Roman soldiers used as houses during appointments. The wall stretches the width of Great Britain (at one of the island's thinnest points) and was apparently a barrier against Scottish invasion, and a way to control the flow of traffic between the Empire and the Northern part of the island.
From Hadrian's Wall, we drove through the Scottish Highlands. Because we were so far North, the sun stayed up well into the evening (it was still perfectly bright outside at 10:30 p.m.). Consequently, Jenny and I felt like we had plenty of time. We stopped and took pictures of the scenery; spent time looking at Eilean Donan Castle (famous for its part in the Patrick Dempsey movie "Made of Honor"); and generally enjoyed our drive.
As the clock approached 10:00, we realized that we had no way of communicating with our B&B to tell them we would be coming in pretty late. As we rolled into Portree, on the Isle of Skye, at about 11:15, we asked a group of people on the street for directions to the B&B Ben Tianavaig. They happened to be the other guests at our place, and they guided us there and let us in. The owners of the B&B had already gone to sleep! Yikes. We would have been out in the cold if we had not happened upon the right people.
Portree is a small, very picturesque town overlooking a harbor. As one might imagine, dining options are scarce in such a town at 11:30. After getting turned away at all the restaurants in town, I found a "Burger Bus." This was a converted bread truck, wafting the smell of cooked ground beef from the town parking lot. Jenny said that, despite her intense hunger, she was not going to eat there.
"Are you sure you don't want a hamburger?"
"Yes."
"I'm hungry Jenny. I'm not going to want to share my hamburger if you finally decide you are too hungry." (I know this sounds insensitive)
"I would rather not eat, than eat from a "Burger Bus"" (To be fair, the place didn't look sanitary, and my burger was simply re-heated.). I had been in this situation before, and almost without fail, I ended up sharing my food. So I did the sensible thing. I ordered two hamburgers. 30 seconds later, Jenny found a fine Indian restaurant that served take-out tandoori chicken, masala, and garlic naan. Jenny got the naan, masala, and tandoori. I got not one, but two re-heated hamburgers from a Burger Bus.
The next morning, we made our way around the island. I had always marveled at the pictures I saw of Skye's landscape, and that is what merited the two day drive from London. I can say that it is one of the 10 most incredible landscapes I've been to. It's right up there with the Fjords, the Subway, the Olympic Peninsula, Guilin, or Iguasu Falls. I mean breathtaking. I would guess that it's something like New Zealand. We went on four hikes that day. We started by hiking to "Old Man Storr." A sheer monolith sticking straight out of the mountain. We then drove to a small parking strip across from the "Quaraing." The hike on this one was pretty arduous, but absolutely beautiful. It was like hiking Angel's Landing, but instead of red rock, everything is lush and there are lakes and water everywhere. There are views of the outer Hebrides, and islands that I'm sure very few people ever go to.
From the Quiraing, we drove across the island to a pasture overlooking the ocean. Our B&B owners had a book in their library which talked about 40 hikes on Skye. One of the hikes takes you through a pasture and down to a rocky platform, similar to Ireland's "Giant's Causeway." All the rocks are hexagonal, and it looks other-worldly. That's where I wanted to go. Well... the pasture was fenced in, and there was a large sign on the fence that said "Danger: Wild Bull." I asked the farmhand, who was working on my side of the fence, whether this was private property, and whether I could walk out to the ocean. He said that people occasionally came and hiked out there, but that the owner of the property wasn't real keen on the idea. My honest opinion is that the actual pathway out to the ocean did not belong to the farmer, but all the surrounding land did, and one had to hop his fence to get out there. After gauging the ferocity of the bull, who at this point was pleasantly grazing in the distance, I decided that the funky, hexagonal stones were worth the marginal risk of playing "Rodeo Clown." I jumped the fence and made my way through the pasture. Jenny was already worn out from our last hike, so she decided to nap in the car.
The hike yielded more than just a view of the hexagonal stones. I passed by a 19th (maybe even 18th) century stone home that had been abandoned. My guess is that it was abandoned when Scottish landowners switched from growing labor-intensive crops, to growing much less labor-intensive sheep. Because a landowner needs dozens of people to plant and harvest wheat, but only needs one person to look after hundreds of sheep, sheep become a more profitable venture. This is what took place in the 19th century, which led many unemployed Scottish laborers to emigrate to the U.S. Who knows, but the person who once lived in that stone home could have come across to the U.S.
From the stone home, I kept walking past a huge stone mound. On one side, the mound had stones arranged in squares that were large enough to be rooms. The mound was so big and out of place, that I don't think it could have been natural. Indeed, when I returned to our B&B, the owner told me that these mounds were used by Scots to defend against Norse invaders hundreds of years ago. I couldn't believe how out in the open this was. If something like this were in Salt Lake (even something 200 years old), it would be totally protected and off limits. I think that, because there are so few people on Skye, things like the mound and the stone home don't get as much protection. It was actually kind of nice. This plays into my whole idea that tourist BMI and authenticity of experience are inversely related. (I'll go into more depth on that in another posting).
The hexagonal stones were awesome, and the only price I paid was stumbling over some barbed wire on my way back over the fence. From there, Jenny and I drove around the Western part of Skye. We ate dinner at a small hotel/restaurant, and then happened upon the elusive Highland Cow. Six of them as a matter of fact, including one albino who we called Milky.
Our final stop on Skye was at a white coral beach on the extreme Northwestern point of the island. It is a breathtaking place. The white beaches (I should note that the whiteness of the beach is occasionally interrupted by a cow pie from a nearby herd) look like they're straight out of Puerto Rico (with the possible exception of the cow pies), and the backdrop is the lush, rugged terrain of Scotland.
From the coral beach, we drove back to the B&B for our second and last night on Skye.
More later on, including: Preston and Glascow, London, Wimbledon, Jack the Ripper and more...
During family vacations as a kid, I remember spending over two hours at a beach only once. We were in Hawaii for a week and a half, and, as I recall, we spent one afternoon of our trip on End-of-the-Road Beach on Kauai. To be fair, we did other amazing things. But let’s just say, as a youth, I probably hung out at the beach as often as Josef Stalin. I made a promise to Jenny, though, that our Europe trip would include at least two trips to the beach. In the end, I think I enjoyed the beaches more than she did (and not for the reasons you’re probably thinking).
After several hours of floating under the cloudless sky, experimenting with toplessness (just me), and reading on the beach, we took a lunch break. We sat in a sparsely furnished restaurant, overlooking the water. Fliers advertising weekend parties were posted on and around our table. An artist stood at one end of the restaurant flipping through several of his prints, hoping to sell to the resort crowd. After lunch, we walked along the hard packed, bleached dirt “boardwalk” towards the shops, whose post-siesta shuttered doors opened as slowly as did the eyes of their owners.
· A perfectly and muscularly round, miniature bulldog, who was surprisingly quick and friendly. She looked at her master with stoic eyes, anticipating the throw of a ragged ball. She then sprinted, head-down, to the ball. To get the ball (which was far too big) into her mouth, she had to touch her nose to the dirt. After each engagement with the ball, she would sneeze and shake her face vigorously, before trotting proudly and defensively back to her master. I have been trying to convince Jenny for three years that we need a bulldog, and this one was my best reference. 
· A small civilized bitch who may as well have been having tea in the Hamptons. As she watched the rest of the crowd, I could almost hear her say, in a slightly British accent, “Oh children…” 
From the park, we walked all the way down to Las Ramblas, passing colonial Spanish architecture and architecture from the modernists like Gaudi. We marveled at how fun-loving Barcelona is, and at how perfect the weather felt. We tried to go to a movie theater along the way, but unfortunately all of the movies were either Spanish or dubbed in Spanish. We were directed to another theater in town and, after spending a little more time on Las Ramblas, which was wild and crazy but not as cool as I had remembered it, decided to call it a night and try our luck at the theater the following evening.
We hiked around a little more and took the funicular down to hear the boys choir, which was sub par. I had actually anticipated better music. Aside from the mediocre performance, the chapel was absolutely packed with tourists, each telling the other to “sit down and shut up!”
Every Thurs-Sun night in the summer, the fountains do a show that rivals (and in my opinion exceeds) that of the Bellagio. We ate slushees as we watched with a few thousand other people. Finally, we made our way down to the movie theater to see Angels and Demons.
There were several merchants spread out over the mile-long plaza, and a flea market at the bottom, but nothing substantial.
The man epitomized the relaxing, laid back nature of Barcelona (albeit an older, less populated version).
Gaudi’s style is based on patterns in nature, and the interior of the cathedral resembles a grove of trees. We enjoyed walking around the interior (which is a full blown construction site), and riding the elevators to the top to walk through the spires. Apparently I am quite a bit more concerned by heights than Jenny is. She was hop-scotching around the thin passage ways between spires like it was no big deal. 
After a quick visit to the Sagrada Familia Museum, we took the metro to Parc Guell, which was originally going to be a housing development for Barcelona’s late-18th Century elite. 
However, the Gaudi-designed development eventually became a public park, and it exhibits all the wackiness, simplicity, and beauty of Gaudi’s architecture. We spent a piece of the afternoon there, had some fruit from a stand on the way back to our B&B, and then headed out to the airport. 
We saw many other masterpieces in the museum, including the map room, tapestry room, and of course, the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel is where the Pope is elected, and site of Michaelangelo's most impressive paintings. Our tour guide pointed out the marks on the floor from the original stove used to produce the black and white smoke, informing the people outside the Sistine Chapel whether or not a new pope had been elected. Black smoke = no new pope yet. White smoke = new pope has been elected.
At the Trevi Fountatin, dozens of tourists threw coins in for good luck. One guy (I'm assuming not a tourist) took his luck into his own hands...
I noticed him walking around with a magnet attached to an antenna. He would look into the fountain for one and two euro pieces, before hurrying to extend the antenna and snatch the coin with the magnet. His lack of shame was a marvel itself. Several tourists showed their frustration, but he just laughed and shrugged his arms. Occasionally he walked with them for a ways, chatting.
After the ceremony, we rushed through the Coloseum, Palatine Hill, and the Roman Forums. One of our favorite parts was seeing the contrast between the incomprehensibility of the construction of the Colosseum, and a display of everyday items found at the Colosseum, including peach, olive, and cherry pits, hair pins, pipes, stoves for heating food, and knitting needles. On the one hand, the Colosseum is so incredible that it's impersonal. One can't imagine how people built it, so it doesn't feel like there is a real connection to the past. Upon seeing the things people ate or did while watching matches, however, one feels eerily close to people who lived 1800 years ago. 
