By now every two bit philosopher has written about the coronavirus pandemic, giving their sometimes insightful, sometimes inane take on the little critters we call bacteria or virus, and how Americans have reacted to the disruption is has caused in our lives. I admit (somewhat sheepishly) I have added to the digital storm against COVID-19. So far, no one has taken my advice, so today we are tacking left on subjects, trying to give a little levity to our lives as we self-quarantine for another 24 hours.
We (Jane and I) have been very fortunate to have been able to travel to some foreign countries in our lives together. Several of these “trips” have been made in conjunction with travel companies, who contract with us to find participants, usually teenagers, and we take these sojourns in the summer months.
One of the perks we earn comes in the period between Christmas and New Years Day when the company hosts a teacher conference in a major Western European metropolis. We have had the pleasure of taking a few days in Dublin, Ireland and London, England, along with a couple of days in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
And then, there was the short trip Jane has dubbed “The Trip from Hell!” Each person we have recruited for the summer trips gives us points toward this free flight to an exotic city. We had already been to Edinburgh, Scotland several years before with friends, but thought since it was a free ticket we would see how the Scots celebrated Christmas.
Just so you do not think we are dripping cash out our deep pockets, the only free part of this trip was the air flight and hotel rooms in the host city. During the summer and fall we saved to make sure our experience was pleasant. This particular “vacation” was taken between 26 December 2018 and 31 December 2018, and began with the usual Christmas Eve Service at Church. Tradition dictates that we come home from the celebration on 24 December, celebrate the holiday with our son Stacy, his wife Carrie and their two daughters, Chelsea and Mariah. Somewhere in there was Lucas, but his is another tale. (Chelsea’s fiancee)
I really don’t like to fly, so all precautions are taken just in case the plane does not go where it is supposed to. (This really does have a part to the tale!) This time, I took Stacy into my closet so he could find where to locate my firearms if I never made it back safely. As I lifted the small gun safe off the shelf, it slipped open, spilling the gun and in the process throwing ammo all over the closet floor. In addition, the safe then slammed shut on my left index finger. There was so much blood we contemplated calling a crime scene cleanup crew to make the place habitable.
Jane came in and tried to stem the flow, and then insisted we go to the emergency room at the local hospital to have it stitched up — after all, a trip of over a thousand miles beckoned. An awkward interlude of Christmas Eve supper and gift-giving followed, and off to the hospital we went, with my finger wrapped in a bloody paper towel around a leaking bandage.
Fairly quickly, the E. R. doctor came in, sized up the situation with my mangled finger, and said, “I’m going to have to cauterize this”. That evil safe had not cut my finder, but gouged a trench through most of it. Being up on those things, I knew the good doc was going to burn the injury closed.
Our trip was begun with a bulky. but necessary, part of my anatomy wrapped tightly. It made dragging luggage a little dicey!
We stayed over night on the 26th at the Hilton Garden Inn at the Indianapolis Airport, then took the shuttle to the airport the next morning. As usual, we had loaded our vacation debit cards from the local back and looked to using those as our travel fund. But to have few local pieces of currency for when we were in airports, Jane went downstairs to get some British pounds. But the lady who dealt with her suggested it would be better to exchange our dollars for more pounds because of our short stay in the British Isles and they would trade them back when we returned to the states. Usually we avoid carrying a lot of cash, but this time, Jane allowed herself to be convinced and converted several hundred dollars to euros.
Because we had spent the night at the Hilton Garden Inn, we took the airport shuttle that morning which had delivered us neatly at the outside baggage check at the airport. It wasn’t until after Jane had converted the currency that we realized that I had left my leather gloves in the car at the Hilton Inn. There really was no time to wait on the shuttle, go back and retrieve them, and then wait on another shuttle to bring us back to the airport before making out way through security, so Jane suggested finding a shop in the airport and buying new ones. After all, it would be winter in Scotland as well, and gloves would be a necessity. Unfortunately, the airport has no outlet stores or Walmarts. The only shop selling gloves was Brooks Brothers! Lucky for us, nice leather gloves were on sale, so my first “souvenir” of the trip only cost me $142!
Our next experience was going through security. Jane and I both had cards telling that she had had two knee replacements and that I had a cochlear implant, but though we tried showing these to the TSA agents, none was too interested. Instead, they made Jane walk through the first scanner which beeped, of course, and then sent her through the full body scan. That is where she really ran into problems. She had bought a fluffy white shirt with a Scotty on it wearing a red coat. It was just perfect for the trip, she had thought, since Scottys are a Scottish breed of dog and we were going to Scotland. What she did not realize was that the sequins that made up the dog and his coat were all little pieces of metal which made the body scan think she had a bomb strapped around her chest. A lot of poking, prodding, scanning with a hand-held scanner by a female TSA agent finally cleared her, but the crazy process was repeated in Newark and again in London. Needless to say, she did NOT wear that shirt on the trip home!
On to the plane rides; from Indianapolis to our gateway city, Newark, to London’s Heathrow Airport, in 8 hours of cramped, sardine-like existence. A series of (now) comical mishaps occurred at the airport. With several planes landing in close proximity to each other, several hundred passengers converged on the terminal we were headed into. Back to the plane ride — airline food is next in palatability to the slop we used to give our pigs back on the farm, so after taking her meds, Jane did not eat much (if anything on the plane), so the crush in the terminal was close, hot and somewhat confusing. Coming to an escalator, a quick right turn in a too large shoe (they hadn’t seemed so loose in the store!) caused her to slip, putting Jane on the floor (on her butt). Quickly fellow passengers righted her after cries of “Are you hurt?” “Are you okay?” “Do you need help?” Mortified, she thanked her rescuers, grabbed her carry-on, and stepped onto the escalator. Again one of the too large shoes, which were slip-ons, caught on the saw-toothed edge of an escalator step and her foot slid right out, tilting her backwards to a cry from a woman of “Look out! There she goes again!” A kindly gentleman righted her with a hand on her back and assured her he would stay behind her until we reached the top of the escalator. Thoroughly embarrassed, we finally made it to the vast waiting area for connecting flights, and settled down to watch the monitors, get something to snack on and try to endure until our Edinburgh flight was called.
We shifted places depending on where the monitors were located and where we could find places to charge our electronics, and one such shift found Jane without her purse. A time of panic ensued, for like most women, her whole travel experience centered in that purse (except for the kitchen sink), but the purse had been located and sent to the lost and found. Reunited with the precious purse with the help of the lovely British woman who had found it and turned it in, we finally located the waiting area for our flight to Edinburgh. It was a short flight to Edinburgh from London, so when we were sent the tickets I went on the Internet to study the history of the company flying us to the Scottish capital. It was called Flybe, a company about twenty years old, and they had upgraded their fleet with several small regional jets, so our initial worry about this unknown company had been allayed. But as we hunted for our gate, we found to our consternation that it was on the ground floor. Yup — on the tarmac our conveyance awaited about a mile across to the edge of the airport, and it was a turboprop. My aversion to flying was such that I never had been on a piston-pounder (with propellers) and avoided flying such in the thirty years of going to Europe. But here we were. Trapped. It was too late (and too crazy) to rent a car and drive to Edinburgh in our jet-lagged state, so we trudged out the door with everyone else. We got on a bus and were dumped on the tarmac and forced to mount portable stairs to get into the plane. It was long, narrow, and had room for 80 people stuffed into the interior. Snacks were not free! On each side was one propeller, and the sound from the engines was quite loud, as one would expect from a machine rescued from the 1940s junk pile. Yet the flight to and from Edinburgh was the smoothest of all those we took that December. (I declined to tell Jane that the left engine, one of two, had been shut down as we descended into Edinburgh. Enough trauma had been experienced by that time!)
Edinburgh was gaily decorated for Christmas and the New Year and we quickly settled into a world-class hotel in the downtown district, on the Royal Mile. A good night’s sleep saw us up and ready to go for the usual sightseeing excursions the next day, which included a tour of one of the royal castles. Thanks to the exchange in Indy, we were able to use English pounds as we gobbled up souvenirs for the few people back home with whom we wanted to share.
We attended all the company’s events, which usually took the course of extolling the excellence of their staff and policies. But also there were the more enjoyable parts of the trip. During our short stay in Edinburgh, our favorite snack spot or eating joint was a French cafe just a short stroll from our hotel. All sorts of continental goodies awaited us when we needed a short respite from the constant wind that whipped down the Royal Mile.
But our next glitch came at that very French cafe. As we were eating on the first day, Jane’s cell phone rang. It was our house sitter. They had had a bad storm the night before and our Direct TV satellite pole had fallen over on the ground. Major catastrophe! They had no television to watch! The house sitter had called Direct TV, but they refused to do anything without our password. Password? We didn’t know we had a Direct TV password! We finished eating and returned to our hotel room where Jane called Direct TV. After some discussion of what the password might be, the employee finally said “It’s a number.” Well, that solved the problem! Jane quickly gave her the number and was told they would get out to put up the satellite dish again about a week after we got home from our trip. Seems they are busy at Christmas! So we had to call the house sitter back and carefully explain how to use the DVD player so that they could watch movies instead of TV.
One ongoing and increasingly annoying problem was my IPad. I had loaded a John Grisham novel to read during flights and downtime in Edinburgh. For those of you who have read Grisham, you know that all his stories are both thrillers, with a lot of twists and turns not foreseen, and this one was no exception. By the time we got to London’s airport, the power was getting low. Having the foresight to bring along adaptors, we tried to find outlets that would recharge the IPad. None to be found! Oh, well, the super modern hotel would accommodate us, we were assured. Even with help from the concierge, no connection could be made in the hotel. Not to be deterred, we asked if there was an Apple store in the city. No problem; there was a new, modern Apple store just north of the hotel a couple of blocks. We made the couple of blocks (more like four or five!) in the howling wind and found the establishment. Nothing on the ground floor was to be found, but up about ten flights of stairs were the attachments and adaptors, even those for American bought tech stuff.
We were courteously helped by the Scots speaking staff, but no adaptors were found for the IPad. Finally, one had the brilliant idea that another store specialized in that sort of thing. It was called “Boots” for some odd reason and there was a store located “just down the street.” We thanked them for their help and set out in quest of Boots. Two blocks, four blocks, six blocks — no Boots. We finally stopped in a pharmacy and they, too, assured us that Boots was just around the corner and beckoning us to come in. Out we trudged in the quickly freezing weather. Finally, after about at least 45 minutes of fruitlessly searching for Boots, we went back to the hotel — in a taxi. By this time our stock of euros was fast dwindling toward nothing.
What this meant was that I had to wait until we got to New York to recharge my IPad; had to wait until then to find out why this war hero walked into his pastor’s study and shot his spiritual mentor to death!
We needed more cash, so the next morning the friendly ATM on the corner was consulted. Our loaded debit card was declined! Back to the hotel and the international phone lines, this time to our hometown bank to find out why. Jane spent most of the phone time, and found out that since most credit card fraud came from the UK, the bank just froze any transactions attempted in that country. Of course, we did not know that, but they did allow us to use the card afterward. But such information was “too little, too late” for our stay in Edinburgh. They would only unlock my card, not both of them, and a second visit to the ATM found that the card still wouldn’t work. Now we really had to parse Jane’s dwindling euros!
The second day was a bus trip to the countryside to visit two interesting locales. First was to Rosslyn Chapel, restored to its medieval glory. Why there? The Da Vinci Code, set mostly in Venice and Italy, had one episode filmed in this ancient chapel. We listened to the spiel of our guide, helped immensely by the large cat who roamed the isles, sat on our laps and purred constantly. We were allowed to go down into the crypt to enjoy a bit of cinematic history. In the gift shop (an ubiquitous part of any trip abroad; you could not exit the place without going through one of these!), the credit card worked well.
Then on to the distillery, a tour of how Scotch whiskey is produced. It was a fascinating production, from water to ingredients, which came partly from Sweden, of all places, through various vats until it was allowed to age, and twelve years later come on the market. There was a tasting room, of course, where all the members of our group were given a small (think communion cup size) of the now aged scotch. That very small sip burned all the way down for me; drinking hard liquor seems to be an acquired taste!
We were “forced” to exit through the gift shop, where all sorts of goodies awaited the unwary traveller. This distillery had a tartan specially made for the company, and Jane has a wallet with the tartan on part of it, and I bought a tie made of Scottish wool with the tartan. Again the credit card performed well.
For lunch that day, we went back to our little French café. When we finished our meal, I drew out my credit card which I had already used at two different tourist shops that morning. The smiling waitress inserted it into the card reader and regretfully told us that it had been declined. By now Jane was running low on euros, since she had spent them freely on other souvenirs that I hadn’t paid for, so, as we both cringed in embarrassment, she handed over her gold American Express card, fearful that such a small business would not accept it because of the higher rate American Express charges businesses. But to our relief, they took it and it was accepted.
Steam was a mild description as we trudged back to our hotel. My first call was to the credit card company. They, too, were mystified. We had enough credit to buy the place, much less a simple meal for two. A simple explanation was not enough to allay my feelings; the company felt the credit card reader was unable to read the card.
But the hits just kept coming. That evening we asked the concierge where a good, semi-fancy restaurant was, and probably used to dealing with middle-class Americans on tour, told us where to find an excellent one just short blocks down the street. So we went and felt our meal would have been improved if we had imported McDonald’s top entrees for our eating pleasure. We ordered fish for the entrée, but for a first course nothing looked like something we would like. Then Jane saw something “cheddar” on bread. Thinking it was cheese, we ordered it, but alas, it turned out to be something black on a sliver of toast. The fish was okay and we had experienced a true Scottish repast, and then came the bill. Out came my credit card and it was declined again. Embarrassment was a mild feeling as I sheepishly replaced the card into my wallet and Jane produced her AmEx Gold card, which was gladly accepted.
The last day we also were rewarded with a bus tour of the exciting places found in the Scottish capitol. Most were forgettable, but one of the metropolitan areas was the site of the three bridges. The bridges were constructed over the Firth of Forth, a way to avoid a long trip around the Firth to get to the northeast coast of Scotland. Our guide was a forty or fifty-year old Scotsman, dressed in his clan’s kilts and giving us a running commentary on the original bridge’s construction and why the other two, included a gleaming new structure, were built. Along the way he took a condescending tone to a couple of us sporting scarves (me) and a tam (Jane) which were brightly adorned with the colors of the Royal Stuarts. He walked up to Jane and demanded, “Do you have a right to wear that tartan? Are you related to the royal Stuarts?” Somewhat taken aback, Jane answered, “No, but my husband is” referring to the fact that I can trace my lineage back to the royal Stuart house of Scotland, descended from Robert the Bruce and other Scottish royalty. He immediately backed up and said, “Okay, then you do have a right to wear it.” And then continued in his discussion of tartans and how most Scots didn’t really pay much attention to them anymore.
But this sojourn to the edges of Edinburgh took a different turn when we were about to re-board the bus to return to the hotel. Our guide blithely announced that the quaint looking pub at the far end of the street was the place where Robert Louis Stevenson penned Kidnapped! Then he herded on the bus and off we went back to Edinburgh. Can you imagine how a retired English teacher and history teacher felt — seeing three bridges rather than finding a bit of our heritage!
That evening we had the “farewell” dinner for the excursion. We were told the fish was best — this tip from the same concierge who told us of the fancy restaurant and of the location for the Apple store! We should have known better, for we would have been better served with a fish sandwich from McDonald’s. But the entertainment was ok, featuring a Scottish lass dancing a traditional national dance.
The next morning we were transported to the airport, and yes, the plane we were to take back to London was the same age, looks and sported two props as the one which brought us to the Scottish capital. And, in spite of my trepidation, the machine had a smooth flight and we were then ready to take off for Newark’ airport. When, being thirsty, we looked for some Evian to drink on the way home and perhaps a snack as we waited in the London airport, I again used my credit card. Surely the card reader in a Heathrow shop would be able to take it! But no such luck! My credit card, with lots of useable credit on it, was once again declined and I had to resort to our last bit of paper money. By the time we were able to finally check our finances, we had exactly seven euro coins to our name. Since exchange places will not convert coins into US dollars, we decided to donate those precious coins to my sister-in-law and niece who were to travel to Scotland the next year. We didn’t tell them they were the product of the “trip from Hell!”
Of course, one final indignity awaited us at the Newark airport. Weary and footsore from our trip, we arrived. A welcome sign, in rather large letters, proclaimed “Those who are 75 or older do not need to remove shoes or belts”, and pointed the way to a foreshortened line to get our luggage. Passport in hand, I approached the airport person in charge. “No!” he declaimed, even after I offered my proof of age (76), so I turned around and went back to the hoi poi line to dutifully line up, remove shoes and belt and be treated like any other hapless traveler. Were we glad to reach Indianapolis and our hotel? Guess!