Our Big Trip to Scotland: Day 1

I ventured off the North American continent for the first time a few weeks ago in September. Greg is a more seasoned traveller than I am but not by much.We both kept travel journals. I am going to post my journal entries in bold with embellishments where needed, one day at a time until finished. Yes, there will be pictures.

Anyhow, I shall begin with  the riveting account of our departure:

Day 1: September 5th, 2016

No reservation for the ferry

This was a major oversight on my part. It was the only detail of the trip I had neglected to tie down. I forgot it was Labour Day and everybody and their uncle (and aunt) would be travelling home. Also only one of the ferries was in service from Wood Islands to Caribou, so there was an unusual four-hour gap between them.

On our way through Montague, I glimpsed the father of the family of Syrian refugees recently settled in town. He was mowing his lawn. I had enjoyed tutoring his mother-in-law in English every Wednesday afternoon all summer, so we stopped to say hello, and he invited us in for coffee. We regretfully declined, thinking we had better get to the ferry.

We reached  the ferry terminal in very good time for the 1:30 crossing and there was no traffic in the lot at all. How odd, I thought. Where were the cars which were left behind for the next crossing? That question was soon answered! Everyone had a reservation and would be arriving much closer to the departure time.  The woman in the ticket booth offered to put us on stand-by; we thought that would be risky, so she directed us to a small side exit — made for clueless people like us, apparently.

So we left Wood Islands at 10:45 am and drove to the fixed link

On the way west, we discussed what we would have done had there been no bridge! Maybe fly out?  Anyhow, the day was lovely, the scenery bucolic, and the traffic light at least until we got to Truro.

A photo I took several years ago of the Confederation Bridge 

I drove from Amherst to the airport… got the shuttle… no problem … Parked in “B” at the end of the driveway near the fence.

We were the only ones on the shuttle bus, which took us the half-mile or so to the terminal. We were too early for check-in (a pattern — unusual for me — which was to repeat itself frequently during our trip), so we explored the airport, then sat on a bench and watched the same people walk back and forth in the concourse. The outfits people choose to wear while traveling are often eye-catching, to say the least. 

Ate dinner at the airport pub, not a bad meal. I had unbuttered boiled potatoes, veggies and fish from which I removed the panko coating.

I am not usually so conscious of food. I just enjoy eating it, but I had had a horrible digestive upset which began the night of July 28^th and lingered for seven weeks. At one point the diarrhea was so bad I thought we might have to cancel the trip. After four weeks or so I went to the medical clinic in Souris (again), and the doctor gave me a prescription for codeine for its off-label side effect: constipation. It proved to be my new best friend on this trip.

Our dinner venue, Maritime Ale House (Source: http://hiaa.ca/at-the-airport/food-beverage/maritime-ale-house/

Pleasant cheerful security people... I walked through the arch by mistake.

Knowing with my fake hip, I would have to go to the imaging machine, I took off for it once the security guard motioned me ahead and walked quickly through the arch most other people go through, thinking I was being very efficient. I wasn’t. I did not however get a chewing out, as I might have in other airports. That is Maritime patience and kindliness for you. I got patted down and then stroked with a wand, and soon Greg and I were sitting on a bench putting ourselves and our luggage back together.

Loooong  Flight — twitchy legs — no sleep

I was assigned a the middle seat on a Westjet Boeing 737-700, a plane  with winglets, which make it look cute and perky and helped instill nonchalance in me. It was full: 130 passengers.

My young seat-mate to the left  spent most of the trip cocooned under his hoodie. After we landed in Glasgow, he said hadn’t slept much either. Could it have been the twitchy restless seat-mate to his right? He was too polite to say. He did say he was from St. John’s, Nfld and was going to spend the next year studying medical engineering at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. (By coincidence, later that day we walked through that very campus.)

Thank goodness Greg was the seat-mate to my right (by the aisle), since I had to crawl out over him a number of times when nature didn’t just call, but hollered. I felt very badly at one point that I didn’t let a very elderly woman, leaning on her daughter’s arm,  into the bathroom ahead of me, but doing so would have been much much worse for everyone.

This is what our plane looked like. (Source: wikipedia)

Finally we landed. I am never going to take another red-eye flight ever again.

The only good things about the flight were that I was not white-knuckled, we didn’t crash, and the Thai chicken wrap I had ordered on-line a few days before leaving — because I thought I might be healthy again by the time we left — was delivered without a hitch.