och aye

Oh, you must all go right now and book rooms at the Cas­tle Dal­housie Hotel. What a find! We did not even get a fan­cy room. But wait, half the fun was get­ting there.

After our love­ly and hilar­i­ous din­ner with the McBs lateish Thurs­day evening, they went home with many exhor­ta­tions to have fun and spend lots of mon­ey in Scot­land, and we grabbed our bags and were off to Euston Sta­tion to catch the Cale­don­ian Sleep­er Train at near­ly mid­night. I had been quite ridicu­lous­ly ner­vous all day over the thoughts of hav­ing screwed up the train tick­ets, or the hotel reser­va­tions, or some­thing, and so to get to the sta­tion in time, get on the train, tick­ets approved, and in our lit­tle cab­in, was quite a relief! We stowed away our small belong­ings in the incred­i­bly tiny lit­tle space (you could either have a shelf, or you could lift it up and have a sink! but not both), got into our paja­mas, unpacked our books, and in my case poured a love­ly lit­tle Scotch for myself, and filled hot water bot­tles from said sink. Heav­en! Soon the train began to rock back and forth, and Avery’s lit­tle com­ments about how cozy she was became less fre­quent, and she had her lul­la­bies and so to sleep. Absolute heaven.

We were awak­ened very ear­ly by the tea lady, bring­ing tea, juice and crois­sants, albeit in a very unro­man­tic Sco­trail paper bag, but hey, gra­cious liv­ing we are not. We could have had first class berths, and I hon­est­ly con­sid­ered it, but we would have been sep­a­rat­ed into two dif­fer­ent cab­ins and that did not sound cozy at all. So we were hap­py to lump it in stan­dard. Rain was falling, but who cared? We stuck our lug­gage in the “left lug­gage” (love the phrase, what about the right lug­gage?), had a glo­ri­ous Ital­ian break­fast at Cen­totre in George Street, which we would high­ly rec­om­mend if you find your­self feel­ing peck­ish in Edin­burgh. Incred­i­ble egg sand­wich­es in cia­bat­ta, and fruity drinks with names like The Pinoc­chio (apple, cran­ber­ry and lime) and The Bosco (lemon and pear). Then we struck out toward the zoo. Even in the rain it was charm­ing! It took us but a moment to real­ize we were the only peo­ple there, not sur­pris­ing, and some ani­mals had the sense to get in out of the rain and were so not vis­i­ble, but the meerkats! The lions! The pen­guins! Adorable. After a good long vis­it, we were off to Edin­burgh prop­er, on a love­ly city bus. In Prince Street we could not resist buy­ing Avery a kilt, and a prop­er Scot­tish knit­ted sweater, by a label called “MacBaaa.” To the sta­tion where we ran­somed off our bags and called the taxi com­pa­ny rec­om­mend­ed by the Cas­tle, and were whisked away to our des­ti­na­tion. You just would not believe the place. In my next post I will begin with a shot of the cas­tle. And the staff! Love­ly! And the fal­con­ry, and the food, and the bun­ny rab­bits on the lawn… to be continued!