Sylvia's Journal

We walked more than was good for us on Monday, our last full day in Bonnie Scotland. We have learned, the hard way, that Google maps isn’t all that dependable. We also never quite know what the reference point is for turning this or that way. You can see your path but you have to walk awhile before you notice that you are walking in the wrong direction. On the small phone screen it is hard to see the city’s bigger picture. As we already knew, context is everything, and old fashioned paper maps provide context in a way that no digital map can compete with.  

We visited the second Museum of Modern Art, which turned out to be Number One of the two. The gallery, and at least one other place we had seen from the topfloor of the double decker bus we traveled to and from the city daily, must have hired a graphic designer who thought he (or she) had a brilliant idea: to put the name of the museum partially on one surface and partially on another, in such a way that you can never see the entire name of the place you are visiting from any one vantage point.  We arrived at the  ‘onal ottish lery dern,’ or something like it. You’d have to know that you were nearing the National Scottish Gallery of Modern Art. Axel said if he had submitted something like that when he was still a student at Mass College of Art his professor would have given him an F (“ a cute but useless signage design”).

We had lunch at the museum café on the outside terrace in a lovely garden. We wanted to sit outside because the sun was shining, and this has been rare and should always be taken advantage of. However, there was also a very strong wind, so strong that it blew the salad leaves right off our plate and Axel had to hold on to this beer bottle. It was so strong that back at our temporary home it had blown over the infant apple tree with its heavy load of a dozen good looking (but still immature) apples. 

We had one final pint, a wee dram of whiskey and an Edinburgh Original G&T in a very old pub, off the Royal Mile, the one with the sign that says ‘unlearn whiskey, drink more gin.’ We now understand why gin is being promoted so heavily (and why everybody and their brother are now distilling gin): it takes a lot less time before you can cash in on your gin making investment – good Scotch takes a while before you can charge an arm and a leg for a bottle. 

We had reserved a table at our favorite oyster and fish restaurant just in time to take advantage of the ‘buck a shuck’ special (which, for our dozen and a half of oysters, shaved 40 pounds off our final bill) and sampled more of their creative and yummy seafood tapas.

On the day of our departure we got up with the sun, a last hurrah before we landed in cool Manchester where we took our Scottish weather it seems. We rode the tram to the airport sitting beside a compatriot who was not only a citizen of Cambridge (MA), but also Dutch, small world I muttered to myself, in Dutch.

At the airport I checked the prices of the 10 best peaty and smoky whiskeys against the list I had copied from Esquire Magazine. I sampled a few but decided none was worth the kind of money I would have to shell out. l don’t have a whiskey habit and live a perfectly satisfactory life without wee drams. And maybe it is with whiskey as it is with arak or Pernod – they taste best in the places where they belong.With this vacation over, we are gearing up for Saffi’s fourth birthday, Faro’s Opa-and-oma-(and-Audubon-camp) vacation, and then our next vacation with the whole family in Brooksville Maine, just 11 days away. The best thing about being a free agent is that can have as much vacation as I want, until the money runs out.