Scottish one-day free tour Nov 2016

We had some fun on a free tour this week, about 9 hours in total starting and ending in Edinburgh. The guide, named John, was great. Talked and talked. The "Free Tours" aren't really free, they're based on the idea that you pay what you want. The tour company is called "The Hairy Coo" and I do recommend them.

Our first stop was the Forth Bridge, which is actually very close to where we are staying in Cramond. I was all excited trying to take pictures of the reflection of it in the water, but I later realized I needn't have bothered, as they have it on the £20 note anyway. 

There are actually 3 bridges here, one from each the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.  That big red one is the oldest. Our guide says that the engineers had the instructions to build a bridge that wouldn't ever ever ever

ever ever

ever Ever 

fall down, because the previous bridge had fallen with a train on it and 30 people died. Of course, 30 people also died building this thing, the youngest one being a 13-year-old rivet catcher. There is a plaque to all the dead guys on the shore.

 It was a glorious fall day.

Other people from the tour got some coffee and hot chocolate and stuff. Coffee is something I often drink too much of while working, so I had this nice healthy stuff instead.  Full of vitamins and tasty too.

 

These are just there along the motorway. Gorgeous, aren't they? And yes they're as big as they look. Not a bad shot considering we were zipping along.

 

We then went to see this amazing tower that I photographed from a distance. It's a memorial built with public donations in Victorian times to William Wallace, on the hill that looks over at Stirling castle and where the Scots stopped to decide how 1500 of them were going to take the 10,000 English dudes hanging out there monopolizing control of the only road to the highlands.

 

This memorial is quite reminiscent of the one to Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh, here, posing with the moon:

 This is the view from the top of that hill, looking at a Victorian spa town in the valley and snow on the mountains (yes, those are the Highlands).

Here's a similar view, a little to the left, with us in it.



And here's the view in panorama with Stirling Castle off to the left. It's much like Edinburgh castle, perched on an old volcano.

A really nice feature of this tour was that we got loads of little walks, and there was  a coffee joint at most stops.

I often take pictures of cool British coins. This one has a rose and a thistle on it. The money you get in Scotland is often different than England (or Wales or other places) which makes looking at the money fun. Took this photo before spending it on tea and hot chocolate to fortify us.

We then went to Monty Python's Holy Grail castle (apparently they used this same castle for three castles in the movie). Yarrow took a video of me and a nice American lady with fantastic (dyed) red hair doing the coconuts scene from the movie.  (hopefully, link to follow soon!)

And, as I have mentioned and showed on Facebook quite often, you often see real guys wearing their kilts in Scotland. Here's an old dude with a cane in his kilt. Thanks for making the castle look good, old dude.
Actually, this wasn't a "castle" according to our guide, because it wasn't a fortification. It was just a hunting lodge holiday home.

Here's our Hairy Coo bus. Isn't it lovely how they colour-coordinated it with the autumn leaves? I think that we lucked into the most glorious possible season to do this tour. The guide agreed.

 Here's a view of the lake where they invented curling. They want to hold the outdoor world curling championships there, but it hasn't frozen over since 1972! Apparently loads of people keep showing up every year, ready for the championships, then going to the pub instead when it, once again, isn't frozen.

Yon typical field-o-sheep. I notice most flocks seem to have ONE black or brown one (you can see it if you look closely -- maybe two in this flock). The guide said that was genetics. My hypothesis was superstition. :) The guide might be right though. Or maybe we both are.

And here is a haggis and mashed potatoe pie.

The butcher where we got this also had scrumptious bridie pies that look like this:



And then that butcher also had desserts and I had asked for one but he started making "jokes" about Trump and wouldn't stop making them so I left the dessert and walked out of the shop. Society needs to stop laughing about having a liar and an abuser in power. This is seriously evil. I wonder if people laughed during the rise of Hitler? Likely.

I was eating my pie sitting beside a new lovely Aussie friend named Ella, and yon butcher man came to window with another "joke" written on a paper. He was trying to be funny/friendly, but I looked away in disgust. Big white guys don't seem to understand the trauma of having a population of males who potentially would think it's fine to grab women whenever and wherever? Not at all funny, as I said. Then a few minutes later he came out and gave me the dessert I'd been thinking of getting, free of charge, and, better, apologized. I am not sure if he understands that there are reasons not to laugh about the tragedy of the rise of a hater, but maybe he does. It was a nice apology anyway.

Anyway, here's a view where the guide took us up to higher ground and told us about Norwegian larch and Norfolk pine and another tree that an 1800s committee decided were the best crops to reforest Scotland with (it had been deforested since the Roman times).

And I am more Canadian than I thought, because I ate all the snow I could while I was up there. I loved it. It didn't seem cold to me yet.

 And now is the part our guide was clearly waiting for all day: visiting his favourite hairy coos. He says they're attracted to his bus Daisy because she looks like a hairy coo, and they're attracted to his hairy coo hat, but I think they're also attracted to him, nice guy that he is (one of those big guys who just emanates bonhomie) and to the bags of bread he brings them!

 Everyone was trying to take a picture and we all got to feed them bread.

 And here's a shot of Glasgow's water supply reservoir.

 Another, taken by cool Aussie chick Ella (most other people on this tour were being lame-o and huddling in bus instead of glorying in mountain air and scenery! I have to say that I love Aussie chick solo travellers in general (our room-mate Erin now is also Aussie and she's fun too, encouraging me to do internet dating though I... haven't). Not sure I feel bored enough to go to all that bother but it would be nice to have a date. It's been like 15 months since I have had a date or a kiss goodnight. Sigh.
Travelling life, mom life...

Then we drove back to Edinburgh and decided to pay our guide definitely more than we'd originally thought we might because he was AWESOME and worth paying a lot. 

Now just because I'm here and I rarely am, here are some other shots of Edinburgh. Here are some of my favourite buildings. As a whole, Edinburgh is stark raving beautiful but as individual buildings I sure do love a half-timbered style, though this one is likely done in the 1800s with the rest of new town (my friend Bev tells me that was a Victorian thing).  

And these ones, which if I had to pick "the most beautiful buildings in Edinburgh" I would pick these. They're perched on the hill by the castle and I'm told they're private apartments. Back in the way back being next to the castle full of smelly soldiers was not a desirable thing, people wanted to be at the other end of the Royal Mile by Holyrood Palace. But if I had a chance to spend time in one of those buildings, I'd jump at it! I'd fly there directly.

And this glorious shot is what I can see most mornings out of the bedroom window in our AirBnB with our landlord Irvine in Cramond. Not at all shabby! Quite glorious in fact. My camera has failed to get all the colours right. This morning, there were pink and purple and blue and yellow stripes.

Conversations in London

We've been in London three weeks now and have less than a week left. The time has flown by, many days of it with me just buried in this little house that used to be a candy shop, doing contract work to try to build the finances back up.

But we have had some nice days out in between. Yesterday, we went to look at paintings at the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. I stayed up really really late Sunday night sending my bosses lots of work and the time difference means I knew I'd have the morning off, at least, and could extend it to most of the day and work in the evening. Freelance has its benefits!

It took us ages to get there in the first place. Started off dragging Young Man out of bed (the teens have definitely hit). Actually, I think I started off just finishing up Sunday night's work and getting all the pieces submitted. That's right. I woke at 4 a.m. and finished at 9. (and you wonder why my memory's bad! Now you see why I'm so attracted to wwoofing. How much lovelier to wake up at 7 or 8 and walk out of the caravan and weed the pumpkin patch or plant potatoes as the work for the day, instead of staring at the computer! But at least I am doing enjoyable math work, albeit long hours on the computer, I'll be grateful in 60 days from invoice when bank account rises.)

After we left the house, we took Wallaby #55 (Yarrow calls the red double-decker busses wallabies, I'm not sure why but we like it so....) down to Tottenham Court Road, where we intended to head downwards to the National Gallery. Had to stop off in the Tube station to top up the Oyster card travel passes first.

(USEFUL note here: if you are coming to London, you must get an Oyster card to travel on the transit. It costs 5 pounds and then you top it up at machines. When you leave, you can get the 5 pounds plus whatever balance you have, back. The only other way to get on a bus in London is to fast-talk and show your handful of money and explain you just didn't know about the Oyster card deal and the bus driver is like how did you get here so far away from where you're staying and then you say that you walked and your feet hurt and then you find out that London wallaby drivers tend towards being very nice. Yesterday, we saw the Wallaby55 that we needed and started running for it and he waited for us to get down the block. Very kind.)
(Other, probably irrelevant to everyone else note: my feet hurt so much with plantar fasciatis that I fantasize almost every day when we are coming home, and when I am waking up, about crutches. When get to next country work posting, going to recommence weight loss schemes. Likely the caffeine I'm guzzling to facilitate the computer work is also not helping the plantar fash. Computer work is just way too hard on my body these days.)

Then I saw there was a Car Phone Warehouse and Boy has been looking for phone case for his iPod 6, a hard to get item, and so we asked in there and then they sent us up the street to Maplin electronics (they didn't have it, and they tried to send us even further up the street to PC World, but we didn't bite this time). Yarrow had very excitedly gone to the Apple store in Covent Garden, which is the architecturally most beautiful Apple store I've ever seen, but they didn't carry iPod cases either, which made him really mad.

Anyway, I didn't mind walking up the street. There were interesting buildings and businesses and people along the way, including some guy who was whistling then saw me look so whistled even more impressively and then attempted some flirty conversation. That was nice if blessedly brief, one of those street-side conversations. It is very easy to talk to strangers in London. I love that about London.

And we saw this thing too, which someone told us (who knows if it's true) when we asked her that it was a BT (British Telecom) tower.

Eventually we got ourselves turned south again and got past Chinatown (where boy was highly motivated to go for steam buns, but there was a horrible stink as we were going past and so we carried on south) and to a row of used bookshops. We bought two in the third shop, unenthusiastically, as they're the kind of literature that second-hand book owners seem to find virtuous -- it has been sooo hard finding just nice books to read, the kind people read in North America, you know. Fun, uplifting, delicious books. So we bought the most likely subjects we could find but our despair over lack of delicious books was not lifted. We've been starved but I really really want boy to stop reading on his phone. Phone reading is not a healthy habit I want him addicted to this young. Back to paper, I've been saying. And saying. And saying. But it's been so hard to find paper! Our facebook friend Christine found us some bookshops and I wanted to go Sunday but I was trying to work, and Yarrow wasn't supportive of getting out of house and we didn't. Anyway we bought those two.

... but further down the street after lunch we discovered the Charing Cross Library, and yes they DID have a book sale and guess what? 3 pounds 80 filled two bags with much better books than we've seen in 6 months. HURRAY! Even as I am typing this blog I am procrastinating ADD-like with reading the delicious "Call Me Sister" by Jane Yeadon. Subtitle, District Nursing Tales from the Swinging Sixties. After our lunch we took those two big bags of books down to the very pleasing art-walled espresso bar with comfy couches in the basement of the National Gallery and marvelled at our loot. I read the first pages of several of them and loved them all. One of them, you can tell the author is going to have a sense of humour as the ship that they are on is called Fishhook. This book I am reading now, I read Yarrow the whole first page, as it's that funny. Here. I'll read it to you too.

"Call Me Sister" by Jane Yeadon

"It was a bad start to a Monday. The teaspoon count hadn't balanced and a bacon rasher had gone AWOL. <props for mentioning bacon -- bacon enhances everything, even books> Inverness's Raigmore Hospital could be heading for meltdown. With a fresh outbreak of nastiness in my female medical ward and its Sister Gall providing it, my dream of leaving hospital work for district nursing had never looked more attractive. After all, I was a qualified general nurse and midwife; I'd had six months' experience working in a male surgical ward and was now completing another half-year in this one. But even if that was a fair amount of training, I'd yet to come across treatment for a pain in the neck."

I also pegged that cafe as a good one because the barista was speaking rapidly to her boyfriend (or a flirt-worthy male of some description) when we had first arrived there before lunch. I'm telling you, having Italians making your coffee is a good thing and London is so multicultural that it is fairly easy to walk past Italian-named cafes with Asian or white baristas, and find yourself an actual Italian being passionate about coffee. In our neighbourhood there is a particularly delightful guy from Napoli who has a little hole in the wall. He makes pizza and pastries in his own kitchen and bought himself an espresso machine and is friendly and complimentary and sweet.

As soon as Yarrow and I first drove from France (which just doesn't have good coffee, usually) to Italy in 2014, the coffeeshop signs started appearing. Italians don't expect you to go through your day without some good proper coffee. Every gas station and even some goldsmiths have an espresso machine and someone with passion and skill to run it properly. Trust me, get your coffee made by an Italian whenever you can. :)

Anyway, I had started writing this post to tell you about two delightful conversations in my day yesterday. The first was at lunch. Yarrow was pushing for Chinatown, and had recently started asking for an all-you-can-eat buffet. So we took a break from looking at paintings and went to find the teenage boy some food. We turned into the first BUFFET sign we say (I didn't realize there were several more around the corner, but never mind).

It was a small little affair, not at all fancy, with cheap tables and chairs jammed in cheek-by-jowl and full of customers. We lucked out! There was a table. There was an older man sitting beside us who looked like he probably lived on the street. Baseball hat and sweat pants and all that. He suggested switching tables so we'd be against the wall and he'd be in the middle so it was easier for him to wedge in and out of it, and I was amenable. I'd been actually wanting that table by the wall as it was nicer, to me, to be out of the flow of people. Anyway I said something friendly or he did and soon we were chatting away.

He was far from a bag man -- he was in London to attend a property auction as he's thinking of adding another one to the 5 he already owns. He pops back and forth to India quite often. We discussed religion (he had a wonderful e-mail from a friend... I'll have to ask him for it and share it with you) and travel and London and schooling and mantras -- at one point he sang a very short om but it was so powerful it echoed like medicine all through my body -- very thrilling.

Tee hee, and at one point he asked if Yarrow spoke English, which tells you how much the teenager talks these days. So then Yarrow was drawn into the conversation.

Anyway even though we'd picked the cheapest buffet and saw there were rather tastier looking ones around the corner, Yarrow and I both agreed we were so happy that we had that conversation with that guy. My heart feels warm and happy and light just thinking about it. He was a lovely warm person.


The second thrilling London conversation of the day was sititng looking at Van Gogh's sunflowers (feet in pain for a few hours now, and not wanting to leave the National Gallery just yet, and possibly inspired by "teenager, possibly bored, a still life"

we had moved on to something lots of people seem to do there. Just sit down and soak it all up. Since boy had quickly moved on to sitting and being bored, it was easy to join in (I banned using the phone for reading, but he started using it to take photos, one of which was this:

Which is a kind of nice arrangement of colours!

So anyway, I was sitting in the room with the Van Gogh stuff, and the man on the bench beside me was looking at Sunflowers and told me how his mother really loved that one and once he had brought her (from Brazil) to see it. He was an engineer and it turned out that he and I had been at Waterloo University in Canada in the same semester (I was only there one semester, on exchange and en route to second semester in Brisbane Australia).

I should mention too, though out of order, that I have had much solace from conversations with Joe, who was taking a stint working at the laundry while the regular woman was away. (We go over there if we need to use the dryer, which is how I met him. Since I'm still trying to kill the odd French flea that pops up, sometimes I go there to dry everything again).  Joe's British but mostly lived in Australia but he's not going back there. Anyway, that's been nice. And he was the first conversation this morning, and this is the last sentence of this blog.

13 layer birthday cake -- while on the road!!

When Boy was 5, I made him a five-layer cake. This year he jokingly said he wanted a 13-layer cake.

I'm always up for a challenge.

To add to the difficulty, we are on the road! I don't have a kitchen of our own.

However (a-ha!) I have a friend who has a candy-making workshop. This homeschooling friendship was formed thus: I met her around town, and I mentioned to her at the farmer's market that I'd love it if we could help her in the workshop some time, so she gave us a few days' apprenticeship! And she's been a good friend our whole time here as well.
So for the 13-layer cake, I asked her if she'd make us up a batch of marshmallow fresh-in-the-bowl. I had of course offered to pay for the batch of marshmallows, but she declined in the end, calling it her contribution to the birthday, which was very kind.

Then I bought an armload of cookies. 19 different kinds. I am not a storebought-cookie-buyer, in general. However... boy wanted a 13 layer cake!

Then we stuck them together with the marshmallow. Here are the raspberries, cooking.

Helena is straining the seeds out. Yarrow objects. He thinks he wants the seeds. She has the decades of candy-making experience. She wins. :)

The concrete mixer: to whip the raspberries, sugar, and gelatin into marshmallowy awesomeness, it takes ten minutes or so in this massive industrial mixer. (She makes marshmallows every day, and selsl them, justifying this massive machine, which I understand are not necessarily available to all people!)

Which turns it into fluffy pink wonderful stuff. 

In the past we always had birthday Lego. This kind of served a double-purpose that way. Cake AND birthday activity!

Thirteen layers happened. :) Here are some of them. 

And finally, the candles and the boy and the table and the people! There he is, all 13 years of him. It's cool that he made his own crazy cake, too.

Birthday treasure hunt photolog

We have a tradition of birthday treasure hunts. My parents made them on the ranch where I grew up, and we had to go kilometres and kilometres. Yarrow and I have lived on rather smaller farms, but we still get some pretty good hunts.

This year's hunt had a Marty Robbins song theme for the clues (which kiddo had to sing).  Here he is, heading off to the silver tree in the distance, barefoot and with backpack for collecting treasures. Handy to have a horse on the scene when one is singing cowboy songs, yes?

The second treasure was to be found in the old blue car, and the third attached to the horse trough (second clue to the tune of Maybelline, third one something about horses...)

The cats were interested and helped out, though Clara got distracted by keeping the kitten in line when we went by the house to the old well in the front yard (the clue was, of course, to the tune of Cool, Clear, Water.)

Okay, I admit, the clue to climb the gum tree was to the tune of Waltzing Mathilda, which is not at all a Marty Robbins song. But if you have a gum tree you gotta play Australian, right?

This is him finding the much-requested bouncy balls in the pumpkin patch. By the way, we planted and maintain this pumpkin patch. All these pumpkins are  here because of us! I take extreme joy in picking them and giving them to the horse, who loves them. It is very strange that I never thought of feeding horses vegetables in Canada. I mean, I thought you could feed pigs the veggie leftovers, but I never knew that horses loved it! Why don't we know that in Canada? Please feed your horses veggies. :)

This patch is right outside our caravan. Yarrow has often mentioned that he feels proud and happy that we made that pumpkin patch happen. Me, I am happy to have largely repressed the thistles! After trying and trying and trying to defeat the thistles at our farm in Springbank, it is a very great joy to have actually defeated them here.

Yarrow says that he is saving these for our holiday with Steven in England, where we are planning to cook a lot. :) I got him special olive oils and vinegars and ratatouille and pistou and aubergines. Joy abounds. :)

What's that you have there, Boy? Alazha wants to know. (It was a boule measuring tool, to measure how far away the petanque balls are from the small ball. Something we've kind of needed!)

Ala and I take a break and guard the loot while the boy takes a while with a clue. Just to bug him about being slow finding purple packets in stacks of pallets, I brought him a Cacolate (bought especially for birthdaying) for refreshment.

This is the boy at the location of the last clue, claiming that there is absolutely nothing to be found here. A bit tricky to see in this photo, but it was wrapped in black electrical tape under the table just at the left there. No excuse -- he knew it was under a table and in this building! :) I just did a little too good of a job of making it look like the rest of the workshop I guess. :)