Ben what adventures did you have in Scotland?
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Ice Cream Jonsey
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Ben what adventures did you have in Scotland?
Greatest country ever, right?
the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!
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Alright, some adventures we had were:
Visiting lots of old broken down castles. Edinburgh! Sterling! Tantallon! Lochranza! St. Andrews! That other one! And that one over there!
Other adventures we had were visiting various abbeys and priories, some next to the castles, some far away! And lots of cemeteries. Don't kid yourselves, people: There are a LOT of dead people in the UK.
Other adventures were, driving around the isle of Arran and getting yelled at by baby sheeps! We both agreed this was the highlight of the trip.
Other adventures were eating some really incredibly good food, and drinking (in moderation, of course) some really incredibly good beer! It's the longest I've ever gone without hot sauce, and also the longest I've ever gone without missing it. I guess GB gets a bad rap for "bland" food, but the depths of flavors were as you'd expect, perfected over thousands of years. And the soups? The SOUPS? Good Lord. I never knew... I just never knew.
The culinary highlight, though, has to be the Arbroath Smokies (smoked haddock, legally allowed only to be produced in a 5 mile radius of Arbroath, using a particular, zillion-year-old method.) Oh, and the haggis. The haggis. Some of it was only okay, but most of it was very, very good, and the stuff we had for breakfast at the Strathearn Hotel was ungodly. I wanted to swim in it.
Other adventures were watching British game shows! Two in particular, "Decimate" and "Pointless", are great, great fun, and something interesting about British game shows, often, nobody wins anything. We saw about five straight episodes of Decimate and Pointless before anyone won a goddamn pence. And even if they do win, the "big jackpot" is like, 3,000 quid. ("Quid", we call 'em over there.) Basically you could go on Wheel of Fortune, not answer a single puzzle, and you'd still win more than the average British game show contestant.
We had the adventure of driving on the left side of the road, in a car with a manual transmissions. Never quite got comfortable with shifting gears with my left hand. Never quite got comfortable with the ten million "roundabouts" that are everywhere. Only got beeped at three times, though, and managed not to kill anyone. Thumbs up.
I personally had the adventure of walking alongside #17 and #18 at St. Andrews Old Course, watching a couple groups finish their rounds. Don't tell Kathy but this was probably my actual top highlight. I mean, there's this place, you've watched it on TV for about 20 years, you've played it hundreds of times in videogames, you feel like you know it by heart even though you've never been closer than 5,000 miles from it, and then... Boom, there it is. You're walking on it, standing on it, seeing it, feeling it.
And you know? If you didn't know it was St. Andrews Old Course, the most famous, historic, important golf course in the entire world, you'd just say, hey look, there's a golf course. Same game. Still saw hackers duffing it up to the green. You still miss putts and say "shit". It's at once completely normal and familiar, and then you look up, and holy shit you're on #18 at the Old Course. Weird dichotomy.
I'm sure there were other adventures. It's all quite a blur, though.
Questions? Comments?
Visiting lots of old broken down castles. Edinburgh! Sterling! Tantallon! Lochranza! St. Andrews! That other one! And that one over there!
Other adventures we had were visiting various abbeys and priories, some next to the castles, some far away! And lots of cemeteries. Don't kid yourselves, people: There are a LOT of dead people in the UK.
Other adventures were, driving around the isle of Arran and getting yelled at by baby sheeps! We both agreed this was the highlight of the trip.
Other adventures were eating some really incredibly good food, and drinking (in moderation, of course) some really incredibly good beer! It's the longest I've ever gone without hot sauce, and also the longest I've ever gone without missing it. I guess GB gets a bad rap for "bland" food, but the depths of flavors were as you'd expect, perfected over thousands of years. And the soups? The SOUPS? Good Lord. I never knew... I just never knew.
The culinary highlight, though, has to be the Arbroath Smokies (smoked haddock, legally allowed only to be produced in a 5 mile radius of Arbroath, using a particular, zillion-year-old method.) Oh, and the haggis. The haggis. Some of it was only okay, but most of it was very, very good, and the stuff we had for breakfast at the Strathearn Hotel was ungodly. I wanted to swim in it.
Other adventures were watching British game shows! Two in particular, "Decimate" and "Pointless", are great, great fun, and something interesting about British game shows, often, nobody wins anything. We saw about five straight episodes of Decimate and Pointless before anyone won a goddamn pence. And even if they do win, the "big jackpot" is like, 3,000 quid. ("Quid", we call 'em over there.) Basically you could go on Wheel of Fortune, not answer a single puzzle, and you'd still win more than the average British game show contestant.
We had the adventure of driving on the left side of the road, in a car with a manual transmissions. Never quite got comfortable with shifting gears with my left hand. Never quite got comfortable with the ten million "roundabouts" that are everywhere. Only got beeped at three times, though, and managed not to kill anyone. Thumbs up.
I personally had the adventure of walking alongside #17 and #18 at St. Andrews Old Course, watching a couple groups finish their rounds. Don't tell Kathy but this was probably my actual top highlight. I mean, there's this place, you've watched it on TV for about 20 years, you've played it hundreds of times in videogames, you feel like you know it by heart even though you've never been closer than 5,000 miles from it, and then... Boom, there it is. You're walking on it, standing on it, seeing it, feeling it.
And you know? If you didn't know it was St. Andrews Old Course, the most famous, historic, important golf course in the entire world, you'd just say, hey look, there's a golf course. Same game. Still saw hackers duffing it up to the green. You still miss putts and say "shit". It's at once completely normal and familiar, and then you look up, and holy shit you're on #18 at the Old Course. Weird dichotomy.
I'm sure there were other adventures. It's all quite a blur, though.
Questions? Comments?
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Jizaboz
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