Freeeeeeeeeedddoooooommm

Perhaps that’s not obviously a Braveheart quote, but that was the plan. Certainly nothing to do with not being at home! Promise! Well, Scotland – the portion of it that I’ve now seen – really is beautiful. After very nearly missing my plane, which really is quite a sinking feeling, I flew into Edinburgh yesterday afternoon. After a bus-trip into town, I hooked up with Adin and made our way through to his (very nice) flat. Obviously so much has happened and we’ve seen many things that it’s nuts to try and list them, but we were fortunate enough to watch a Bagpipe retreat at the Queens Palace yesterday evening – just happened to be in the right place at the right time. We’d already climbed Arthur’s Seat – a small mountain in the middle of Edinburgh in some bitterly cold weather and seen a fair amount of the touristy buildings. A couple of his friends came over for supper and we had a great evening.

We’ve managed to find accomodation for tomorrow night as we head up towards Ullapool – being a bank holiday on Monday means that everything is fully booked, so we came close to ‘sleeping in the car’. Shew.

Anycase, this isn’t exactly a very detailed record the last few days, but time is of the essence – as usual.

Later: This is now, later. We went out again after the last post, and visited the botanical gardens – they were very impressive. We walked to get supper, walked to pick up friends, and eventually walked to the Queen’s Hall for an evening performance of A9 – a current hot-band playing a mix of jazzed up fiddle music with a modern spin – really good. A deep-fried Mars bar was meant to be the finale of a very busy day, but then we ended up having coffee with Adin’s girlfriend, and walking back in the ice cold wind at about 1am. It’s now 2:30am, and we’ve packed for our early morning departure – picking the car up at 9. I’m hoping to skype the family before going because I’m certainly not likely to get a good chance up North, and we’ll only be back Monday evening. Consequently, this might be the start of some blog-silence again. We’ll see. Either way, I fly to Heathrow Tuesday morning…