Melyssa-with-a-Y

Part 2: Edinburgh and Scone We flew into Edinburgh on Friday evening. The flight was relatively empty, but there were clearly some shenanigans in store - "Marilyn Monroe" and his buddies were on our flight, probably heading for a stag party.  We figured out how to take the tram into town, picked the tram station that looked like it was the closest one to our hotel, and got off. Edinburgh is beautiful, but I wish someone had warned us in advance about the hills. The path we chose from the tram stop to the hotel, while shortest on the map, took us past the Royal Scottish Academy and the Scottish National Gallery and up a GIANT staircase, over the same hill that the castle is sitting on. Once we made it to the top of the hill, we turned right and took a lovely curved little street (Victoria) back down the hill to the "Old Town" part of the city.  Our hotel was on Grassmarket , which is a lovely open space that had been a marketplace back to the 1300's. On...

Before I start writing about the amazing castles and wonderful places we visited across the pond, I have to talk about the pre-trip craziness. We almost didn't go!  In mid-June, I came down with a stomach bug... I thought it was something I ate, but I have since heard that others caught it from something in the water. This is not something I would wish on my worst enemy. But then, because I was eating what I thought was the right thing - the BRAT diet, mostly - for the better part of three weeks, my gall bladder got cranky. So then I was taking antibiotics for the stomach issue plus antispasmodics. And still feeling awful, and working from home. To add insult to illness, on the Thursday before we left, I went out to run some errands, and got rear-ended at the traffic light a mile from our house! Now, the kid was not moving fast - he was already stopped, but his foot slipped - so it didn't do much damage. I took his info, but really, he was so young and earnest (damn those pup...

Homeward Bound  We got up at 8 – I smelled bacon! – and showered and went into the main house for breakfast. The Inn’s cook made us breakfast (we never got their names!) – scrambled eggs, toast, hash browns and Canadian bacon. Here, at least, the coffee was better. We were the only people staying in the house, so the staff sat and chatted with us for a while. We got an impromptu history lesson about Fort Davis – one woman’s mother had worked in town for Harvard University’s radio telescope astronomers (and that is why there’s a Harvard Hotel in town!) so she had been there since the late 50’s. She talked about how different it was once the NPS took over the Fort itself – kids used to go and climb on the ruins, etc. She also told us that there are four foreign exchange students staying in the house, and one of them is the Polish kid that we’d seen at Murphy’s and the Drugstore.   (aha!) We had to stop at the Davis Mountain Nut Co. store in town – we’d had their “mocha m...

Day 3: McDonald Observatory Wednesday morning, we started with some instant oatmeal in our room, rather than trying to hunt for a breakfast spot again. And here we come to lesson #4: The coffee in west Texas sucks .  Granted, it was hotel room coffee, but even the stuff from the lobby was bad. Even Alice’s coffee on Tuesday was bad. And the trend continued through McDonald and Fort Davis. Or maybe I’m just spoiled by the awesome coffee maker we have at home, and the ready access to Starbucks, which hasn’t made it out to Marfa yet. Just sayin’.  I stopped in the gift shop for a Marfa t-shirt, and we set off to the north for Fort Davis and the McDonald Observatory . We stopped for lunch in Fort Davis at Murphy’s and had subs. They were really good. We also learned lesson #5: everything comes with a bag of Lay’s potato chips.   At first, I ate them, but later in the trip we just started hanging on to them, and came home with 4 bags in our “snack sack,” whi...

Marfa, McDonald and Beyond This is the wonderful trip John planned for me for my birthday (6 months ago) and only revealed in early July. When he had the idea in February, the first time the tickets were available to the special viewing at the 107” telescope at McDonald was August 21. So that became the central event around which the trip was built. We left on Monday and started the drive west. We stopped for lunch in Mason, TX – a quaint little town with a population of 2,104. The town’s claim to fame is that the largest blue topaz found in the US was discovered there. But of course that museum was closed on Mondays. (We should’ve sensed a theme…) We had lunch and looked around a bit, added a little gas to the tank, and got back on the road. (114 miles) Turns out Mason was exactly half-way to our first planned vacation destination, the Caverns of Sonora , in Sonora, TX (114 miles).  The caverns are a National Natural Landmark. The cave was warm and muggy (98% h...

In February, John decided we should go away for a weekend. Because of our schedules (mostly mine, sadly), we didn't get to go until this weekend. He chose a cute little B&B with individual cabins, in Fredericksburg, TX. Unfortunately, we waited a little too long to leave on Friday, so it took longer than it should have to get there. But, we picked up our keys and went to find some dinner. The food (and the beer!) at the Fredericksburg Brewing Company was just what we needed (maybe too much!), and John picked up a t-shirt that turned out to be perfect for our Saturday adventure. After dinner we went back and found our cabin at Barons Creekside . It was adorable! The cabin was originally built in Kentucky and brought to Fredericksburg. From what we could tell, it was sort of split in half, and they put the kitchen and bathroom area in the middle, between the living room and the bedroom. But it was just enough space for us. :) Saturday morning we got up relatively early and set...

Wow, it's been a year since I blogged here. But it's hard to describe a week-long trip abroad in short snippets on facebook, so I thought I'd write it out. I left on Saturday, June 25. John was nice enough to drive me to the airport for my 6am flight to Newark. (oy, I'm never doing that again!) Then I had five hours to sit around the airport to wait for my flight to Stuttgart. I watched a movie on Netflix ( TiMER ), watched some Wimbledon tennis in the Heineken bar, and even got a little work done. The plane was mostly full of Germans. There was one poor German woman on the plane whose son didn’t board in Newark… she cried half way across the ocean. (But he’s 24… he can probably deal.) I didn’t sleep much at all on the plane. I watched Rango during/after dinner, and then tried to sleep but couldn’t… and then with two hours left (at 5am), the guy behind me decided to play some kind of game on the screen on the back of my seat. UGH. No matter how many times I turned ...