Scotland2005: Edinburgh Day 3

It really is a small world. Today while out exploring we ran into a couple of retired ladies from Seattle who's husbands were busy elsewhere this morning chasing a wee white ball. We set out early on the train north to visit the ruins of the great cathedral and castle at St. Andrews, which I understand also is a town that has something to do with golf...

The train ride is a little over an hour, and the train station itself is outside of St. Andrews in a town called Lechurs, and you would take a local bus to get to St. Andrews. The bus was a typical British double decker, and there was no one aboard, so we took the seats at the front up top. Nothing like lurching down a windy Scottish country road at the top of a bouncing swaying double decker bus to slosh the morning coffee about. These look like PERFECT motorcycle roads too, and we are wishing we had our bikes --we could rent some here, but at £75 a day (or $140), we've been resisting the temptation. That and the left-hand drive thing...

But it was a nice 20 minute ride out to the coast and St. Andrews. This is one of the oldest towns in Scotland, and home of the oldest university in Scotland. There is also a lot of lawn, with pockets of sand and a few silly flags scattered about...something to do with golf I think...

We walked down to the ruins of the Cathedral which were destroyed during the religious reformation in the 1500s, and have been ruinous ever since.
It at one time was the largest cathedral in Scotland, and the seat of the medieval church. One of the towers of the cathedral still stands, as well as partial walls, and you can climb an endless circular staircase to get to the top, but you have to pay to do so. One gets a token from the visitor center to access the locked turnstile, which then allows one to go up the stairs. Two ladies along with Tony and I were trying to figure out the coin mechanism to operate the door and manged to lose three of our four tokens until we figured out that you had to be INSIDE the turnstile before depositing the coin and pushing through. This entailed Tony walking back to the vistior center for more tokens.

It was then we learned they were visiting from Lacey and Kent, Washington, and had been on the road for five weeks visiting Ireland, as well as England and Wales. The husbands were out swinging clubs (some sort of straight person mating ritual I suppose) while they went exploring the ruins with us.

We had a grand time talking while we wandered about the ruins of the cathedral as well as the neighboring castle, which is where the Archbishops lived at the time. As the Protestant reformation was waging, the Archbishops holed up in the castle, and the folks trying to kick them out decided to dig a tunnel into the castle. The supporters inside heard the sounds of digging through solid rock, and started digging out to meet them. The ancient tunnel is still there and still explorable assuming you want to crouch down and crawl through. We did. I don't know why, but we did.

We then bade our friends goodbye and walked down through the University, which was just getting started. It is a nice small college town, and I could see myself teaching here on a sabatical -- assuming St. Andrews University wants to have a course on state legislative process. I think I would look very good in a wool tweed jacket, with leather patches on the sleeves, and could be very professorial if I tried.

We continued down past something called the "Royal and Ancient Golf Club", but the stuffy people outside shooed us a way for some reason, but we could see lots of people dressed rather fancy [Tony says "odd"] walking about on the lawn behind the fence with long sticks in their hands. [Tony says BORING!] So we hopped the bus back to the the train station.

After pouring over the train timetable we decided to take a side trip onthe way back to Edinburgh to the town of Dunfermline. There is another ancient abbey here, dating from the 1090s, and its where King Robert the Bruce's tomb is located. This trip involved taking three short hops on three trains, using our phone book sized National Rail Timetable, but it worked, and we had a chance to walk through another charming, quiet little town to the Abbey. Bruce is the King who won the independence of Scotland in 1314, and whom the movie Braveheart makes out to be a bad guy, but in reality is quite revered here in Scotland.
We caught a train back directly to Edinburgh, and are now resting our feet in the Internet cafe, and ejoying a nice drink. (My feet by the way are not nearly as bad as yesterday, but still more sore than I'd like, and I'm still kind of limping like an old man..)

Tomorrow we will be chaufered about by our friends Malcom and Jonathan, whom Tony met from the Bear Scots group. Actually it will just be Malcom who will take us out to some rather spectacular ruins on the coast, and then we'll join up with Jonathan for dinner -- Jonathan says there is nothing more boring than traipsing about old castles -- but Malcom, Tony and I dissagree wholeheartedly.

We decided that we'll stay an extra day in Edinburgh, since we'd like to do some laundry and we've still not booked anything down the line, and there is a couple of things we'd still like to see here. We'd planned on leaving Wednseday, but now it looks like we'll likely go to Glasgow for Thursday and stay there at least through the weekend.

We've pretty much unplugged, and haven't read a newspaper or watched the news at all, which is really rare for me. We're a long way from running out of things to do or see as well, and as always, wish we had more time. That teaching sabatical thing isn't looking all that bad now that I think of it.

From the Internet Cafe in New Town Edinburgh
Gary and Tony