Scotland & Ireland Travelogue
Of Kilts & Clover – Our Travels to Scotland & Ireland
Days 1 – 2 – No Longer a Haggis Virgin
Our first layover in Philadelphia found Mary and me tanking up on cocktails before our long flight over the Atlantic.
A view out the window as we left Philly, when darkness overtook us for 7 hours of sleepless hell.
Edinburgh, the capitol of Scotland, greeted us with bright skies, blustery air and democracy.
We spent our first half day of jetlag touring the National Museum of Scotland which features a lot about Mary, Queen of Scots, one of history notable tragic royal figures. Look closely and you’ll see her gorgeous pearl necklace, which was evidently removed before her beheading.
A replica of Mary Queen of Scots’s sepulcher cap. Yes, I am obsessed with historical deaths, especially ones that are tragic.
A Scottish virginal, late 1500s, the precursor to the harpsicord. Mary Queen of Scots liked the virginal, as did Shakespeare, who wrote about the virginal in his Dark Lady sonnets.
An ancient Scottish necklace from the early Bronze age, circa 2500 BC.
See the two serrated hooks below center? They’re spearheads for fishing, dating back to 7000 BC. That’s right, Scottish civilization dates back long, long before the great pyramids were built.
Mary and Yours Truly letting the brisk Edinburgh breeze waft away the jetlag.
For lunch we met up with our Scottish friends Shona and Steve, who kindly treated us to lunch and gave us some local travel tips.
Steve’s number one local tip was to order the Scottish haggis…and it was wonderful!
Before crashing back at our hotel, we toured a Scottish graveyard and found this statue of Abraham Lincoln over a memorial honoring Scottish-Americans who died in the Civil War.
The next morning we got our rental car and drove north over the Queensferry Crossing Bridge, an insane engineering project that took 6 years to build because of the high winds that barrel through Firth of Forth Bay.
We spent midday in the gorgeous seaside college town of St. Andrews.
Here, the University of St. Andrews resides cheek-to-cheek with ancient Scottish ruins.
Yours Truly strolling through campus looking for a toilet.
Mary beside some ruins looking coy.
The glorious ruins of St. Anthony’s Catholic Cathedral, built in 1158, it fell into disuse and ruin in the 1500’s after Catholicism was outlawed.
St. Rule’s Tower, built about a century before the cathedral, has out-survived its younger sibling.
On the grounds of St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Mary and I found this hell hole, capped off to protect tourists and atheists.
Mary and Yours Truly at the ruins of St. Andrew’s Cathedral, a relic in worse shape than me.
What to say of this magnificent Catholic ruin? Too bad every church, temple and mosque hasn’t fallen into disuse, so that humanity could’ve been spared the scourge of organized religion.
“Hello? I really need to make a call, but your phone booth doesn’t work.”
Yes, there is a street in this town called Butts Wynd.
