Goodbye to a piece of personal history

My next post was to have been another in the series of Scotland to Iceland adventures but today was important and deserves comment. So here we go.

I wouldn’t say we’re trying to downsize as such but we are taking a close look at what we have and asking ourselves if we are likely to use certain items again. Among those things is the canoe that we built ourselves and all the river gear we accumulated during our years of wilderness canoeing. Over time our interests changed and at some point we stopped canoeing and started cycling instead. I can’t remember the last time we had the canoe in the water and if we canoe from now on it will be in a rented canoe on a nice tame river or lake. We have offered the blue canoe to several people. One person said two years ago that he would like it but we have reminded him of it 3 or 4 times since to no avail.

The blue canoe

Today someone came who wanted the canoe and was prepared to take it immediately. I rounded up all the gear except our old life jackets, which nobody would want anyway, and we packed it all into his truck. When it came to moving the canoe it was so much heavier than we remembered. I swear it has gained weight just as we have over the years! I can’t believe that we blithely put it up on our shoulders and portaged it for over a mile in some places.

I told the new owner that there was a high price to pay: he had to look at the photo album of our trip down the Nahanni in which the canoe features prominently. He was very gracious about it as we sat in the shade and swapped river stories. Before taking his present job he was a river guide for different rafting companies and he has rafted down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. I enjoyed talking with him about our trip and he enjoyed seeing photos of a river he has never been on. We both marvelled at how far river gear has come.

As he drove away with the canoe strapped to his truck I felt lighter knowing that he would refurbish it and it would again find its way onto rivers. That, after all, is where canoes belong, not sitting in a backyard next to a fence for years on end. I hope this is the start of parting with a number of things that are relics of wonderful adventures that we have no desire to repeat. We don’t need repeats: there are enough new adventures waiting just around the next bend in the river.

Paddles, barrels, and bags

Odds and ends from Edinburgh (Scotland to Iceland 2)

I wrote the previous blog post while I was in Scotland. I realized as I looked through some of my photos that there were other interesting tidbits that I didn’t cover so here are a few photos and some things I found interesting.

Riding up to Arthur's Seat

Nearing the top

Portobello Beach

On our bike tour we rode up Arthur’s seat. I was very glad to have an e-bike. We had walked up to the top the day before and it would have been a real slog with a regular bike. I used to say I’d never met a hill I couldn’t walk and that’s probably still true but if I can get a bit of an assist from an electric motor I’m quite happy not to have to walk. We also rode down to Portobello Beach. It was a bit chilly and, because it was a weekday, there weren’t many people there.

Tempting Tatties

I’m also including a photo of a little shop called ‘Tempting Tatties.’ It was on the way to our hotel and we walked by it a number of times before stopping in for a very late lunch the day of the cycle tour. I’m happy to eat potatoes any time and the ones we had that day were tasty and filling.

I think when I travel next I’m going to take more photos of interesting signs. I didn’t get a shot of one outside a pub that said, “Mary Queen of Scots probably drank here.” I got a few other interesting ones though.

Edinburgh Scotland to Iceland 1 (June 7, 2023)

 

We took an overnight direct flight from Calgary to Edinburgh. The first day was mostly to get over jet lag which we have almost managed today. Yesterday we went to the train station and bought tickets to get us from Edinburgh to Inverness and then from Inverness to Glasgow. The agent was very helpful and saved us money by suggesting that we buy return tickets from Edinburgh to Inverness and then a single ticket from Edinburgh to Glasgow. We don’t need to change trains the day we go to Glasgow and we have an open ticket so we can leave pretty well any time we want to.

The accommodation here is fairly nice. It’s a bit noisy as we have construction right across the road from us and we found out the hard way on the first day that the smoke detector is pretty sensitive. R was cooking when the smoke detector went off and that set off the sirens in the whole building. It brought the lady from the front desk running. We assured her that nothing was going to burn down and I think she was able to stop the fire engines from responding. Since then we have been very careful to have both windows open when we’re cooking.

We have a bedroom / sitting room area with a TV which we don’t use. There is a small, decently equipped, kitchen complete with a small dishwasher and a clothes washer under the counter. We took advantage of the dishwasher last night and did a small load of laundry today when we got back from our bike tour.

The bike tour was fun. We both opted for e-bikes which we didn’t need for most of the ride but there was one significant climb where they certainly paid for themselves. We saw quite a lot of the city and the guide was knowledgeable and a good sport. There were six of us: two from Australia, two from Newark New Jersey USA, and the two of us. We were mostly on bike paths and when we were in traffic it certainly didn’t bother me. What I did find difficult was getting on and off the bike. It had no crossbar but I still had to lean the bike over quite a bit in order to get my leg over. After a while I started with my left foot on the pedal, gave the bike a push and then swung my right leg over the way I used to do when I rode my touring bike. I didn’t do as good a job stopping though and definitely felt uncoordinated as I struggled to get my leg back through the frame.

The other thing I found very awkward was not having my clipless pedals. I’m used to clipping my right foot in, pulling the pedal up to the top of the stroke and then pushing down while I get settled on the saddle. I found myself fluffing around trying to decide whether to push down on a partially raised pedal or to give a mighty push and then try to get the other foot onto its pedal while trying to steer. Fortunately, although I did a fair bit of wobbling, I didn’t end up in the canal as one of the people on our Holland trip did. Our guide for the day told us that we were going to dismount at the first bridge because he had had one person from the US and one person from New Zealand actually miss the corner and end up in the canal. It was a rather tight turn. I had enough trouble negotiating the bedsteads which clearly shows me that I haven’t done enough riding of late. Clumsy as I was getting on and off the bike, once I got riding I was fine. We covered about 45 km and saw a lot of the city.
On this trip we chose not to do the regular tourist things. We didn’t go to see the castle or any museums. We have walked part of the Royal Mile because it is on our route from the Old Town to our apartment hotel.

I have my new carbon fiber ukulele with me and I decided that I should get a sticker for the case. Apparently they don’t do stickers here, or at least, not in any of the souvenir shops I’ve been into. There are a ton of fridge magnets but no stickers and no pins that I’ve seen. I don’t think I’m going to be able to find one because we leave for Inverness tomorrow and I’ve tried about half a dozen shops in our immediate area.

When we arrived at the airport we bought a three-day tram pass and that has turned out not to be a good idea. We have been able to get anywhere we wanted to go by walking or on the bike today. Oh well, we’ll chalk it up to our contribution to the infrastructure of Edinburgh.

Yesterday we climbed up to Arthur’s seat and had lovely views in all directions. Today we cycled up the road to below Arthur’s seat and our guide pointed out that Edinburgh is founded on 7 hills. When we were up there yesterday we noticed a coiled sculpture that looked a little like the Dairy Queen swirl on the top of an ice cream cone. Today we asked about it. He said it was a shopping centre and that the locals call it the ‘jobbie’ i.e. the piece of poop. That was the other thing it reminded us of but we were trying our best to be polite.

The first night we had wraps in a little Turkish place. They were quite tasty. There is a Tesco Express half a block from us and we have made two trips there for provisions. Yesterday we ate all our meals in the hotel. Today we were just a wee bit hungry by 2:30 when we finally got to sit down for the first meal of the day. We’ve been past a little place that sells baked potatoes several times so we decided to stop there for brunch on our way home. I had a potato with chili and jalapenos and R had one with tikka masala. We very much enjoyed them. Tonight we need to eat up the salad and veggies we have left so we can be ready to leave in the morning.

I think it might be just about time to take stock of the food we have and take care of it. I’m not sure when my next entry will be but I’ll try to summarize what we do in Inverness and Glasgow before we join the Ocean Endeavour to sail from Glasgow to Aberdeen and visit the Scottish Isles.

Excuses or Explanation?

I just checked when I last put up a blog post, June 2. It is now August18. Yikes! I know many of you are waiting for stories of the trip to Scotland, the Faroes, and Iceland. I did draft some posts while I was away. Since I’ve been home I’ve been avoiding the blog, or more properly all the photos I took while on the trip. I took a small, pocket camera and my cell phone and thought that would mean many fewer photos to go through at this end. There may well be fewer photos but trying to corral them all is a bit of a challenge.

I’ve yet to find a way of handling photos that works well for me. Part of that may be that I work on a Mac computer and an android phone. Not going to get into the whys and wherefores of all that now. The computers we have are 9 years old and when queried about how much we could get trading our computers in, our friendly Mac website told us, “Your computer is ready for recycling.” Uh, thanks.

We got new computers and there are still a few things I’m not sure about. I like Google photos because it works seamlessly with the blogging software I use. Google photos is telling me I’m almost out of space so I’ve tried, with R’s help, to cut down the amount of space I’m using. Factor in a bunch of dithering on my part about what to keep and what to toss and that adds up to time. I’m now ignoring the whole thing until my storage is actually full; then I’ll decide what to do. One issue solved temporarily.

Phones. The day before we were to leave for Scotland R dropped his phone on one of the two tile floors in the house. The back shattered but it still worked. Luckily I had an extra case which did an admirable job of holding the phone together until we got back to Canada. It did get a bit dicey when we had to change sim cards because each time we did, little sparkles of glass floated to the floor.

Once we got home we decided it was time to replace the phones as well. I thought I had downloaded all the photos onto my computer but I can’t find them there. A week or so after we got the new phones and I had passed my unbroken phone onto someone else, I was riding my bike up a hill and my new phone leapt out of my pocket and landed on the street. I pulled over, put my bike down, and rushed back to get the phone just as a car ran over it. It sort of worked but only half the screen would show at a time. R dug out his cracked phone and set me up with it until I could get mine fixed. All of that adds up to, you guessed it, more time.

Anyway, the phone is now fixed. I can find the photos I took on the phone in Google photos and the ones I took on the camera are on my computer’s hard drive so it’s now time to get the lead out. I’m also searching in Google drive for the posts I drafted while on the trip. I didn’t give them titles and I don’t remember how many I wrote. As I used to say to my students, “If I ever get organized I’ll be deadly!” They just laughed. I have found one post about Edinburgh, the first place in Scotland that we stayed so I should be able to get that one up in short order. I’m not sure whether to warn you about an upcoming deluge of posts or whether that’s just being optimistic. Stay tuned.

In the meantime I’ll leave you with a photo of the back of my phone case sporting a one-of-a-kind tire track on it.