So now begins the infamous recap of our whistle stop tour of the UK, I have no idea what to even write as we saw and done so much (sometime too much) in the short space of time… I’ll start as most do in the beginning.
Jetlag is a bitch, it really really is, we left Atlanta at around 8pm on Friday evening and landed in Edinburgh at around 9am (local time) the next morning, it wasn’t a particularly nice journey and Atlanta was just so hot and sticky it made me feel gross before even getting on the plane, so we were both pretty miserable by the time we got off it. I managed to get some sleep, but I’d be rudely woken by pockets of turbulance so it prolly amounted to an hour, if that. Once landed it was weird to go through UK immigration saying I was only visiting… We met my mum after successfully smuggling 1,000 Marlboro lights through customs for her (we were only allowed to bring in 200) and went back to her house in Grangemouth.
Saturday was a washout, Red Bull couldn’t even keep Robyn awake, but she did manage to visit my grandma (my mum’s mum) for the first time. I think we both ended up crashing out around 7pm.
The next day wasn’t as bad as Saturday, but we were still feeling out of time, a quick visit to nearby Linlithgow Palace gave Robyn her first taste of old Scotland before my brother, sister-in-law, neice and dad came over to my mums house for dinner. This was the first time we had seen my dad or my brother since the wedding, and it was also Robyn’s first opportunity to be an aunt with my neice who I hadn’t seen in over 2 years. After the dinner and after some playing around in the garden it was time for some embarrasment as Robyn asked to see baby pictures…
No sooner had we arrived and we were off again, we decided that visiting London would be a good idea so we took the GNER East Coast line down (while enjoying the free WiFi) in which was a really enjoyable journey before arriving at platform 9¾ in King’s Cross, I shit you not… And after checking in to our hotel we walked along the road to Harrods which was crawling with tourists, this would become a running theme…
A quick stop at Picadilly Circus was next before heading to Waterloo to meet up with Phil and take a flight on the London Eye which is actually an amazing way to see London, we tried to time it so we could see the sunset while going round but unfortunatley no one was queuing and sitting by the Thames is a cold place to be that time of night, it was still cool though, and even though I’m afraid of height, I had no problem in the capsule, prabably because it moves so slow you dont feel like you’re moving at all. Anyways, it offers a great vantage point over central London and views of the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, Telecom Tower (to name a few) are breathtaking. After a late dinner we said our goodnights to Phil and went back to our hotel for a goods night sleep…
Except the following day was the Summer solstice and the sun rose promtly at 4:30am and we didn’t have our curtains shut from the night before. Gah! Just GAH! Though, Robyn was got good when she awoke to look out the now closed curtains at around 8am. After breakfast we went to the British Museum to see the roof they put over the Great Court a few years back, the reading room as well as the Rosetta Stone.
We had arranged to go to Madame Tussauds with Phil but he couldn’t make it, but he didn’t miss much anyways as the place was so crowded we saw next to nothing and just got pushed along with the crowds, which kinda sucked, but I did get a picture of Robyn schmoozing with Hugh Grant, “lynndie-ing” Saddam amongst others… To round off our whirlwind 2 days in London we took one of those open top bus tours to see everything we missed like Tower Bridge while seeing more of the London Eye and Houses of Parliament.
Then came the Sleeper train to Inverness where we spent a day around Drumnadrochit and Loch Ness taking in Urquhart Castle and Culloden battlefield… Robyn also got close to a Highland Cow, though she wanted to hug one (don’t ask me why). Soon enough we were back on a train to Edinburgh before driving through to Glasgow to see my dad then brother and sister-in-law as well as other family members. And driving was pretty weird, but I got used to it pretty quickly, and hey! I didn’t crash or kill us though there were a few hairy moments.
We did some shopping in Glasgow in a packed Buchanan Street and took in a few sights like George Square and the Gallery of Modern Art, there was no cone on the head of the Duke of Wellington statue for some reason but overall the experience reminded me of why I hated Glasgow on a saturday afternoon… The remainder of the time was just relaxing, Robyn went to Edinburgh with my mum and I met up with an old friend and went to Loch Lomond before heading back to Atlanta, the flight home wasn’t any better than the flight there thanks to screaming children… But we did see a few cool things out the airplane window, like the Forth Bridges, Scottish Islands and the north tip of Long Island, NY (Manhatten would have been a good picture, but it was on the other side of the plane), I also saw Boston all the way to the tip of Cape Cod, but didn’t have the camera out at the time as it was back in the overhead compartment.
So that was that, our much anticipated tour of the UK, at least next time we dont need to do the London/Inverness thing, and we’ll prolly be gone for longer than 11 days.
United Kingdom – June 2006 (Set)
Originally uploaded by FLC.