Post Outerspace Post

I was prepared Saturday to spend the entire day cleaning the apartment. It was around 11am and I was organizing half-finished boxes of food in the kitchen when the phone rang. It was Margaret, who said she was leaving for Edinburgh in 20 minutes and wanted to know if we wanted to come along. Of course we did. We layered on the winter clothing and were soon on our way to the city. The roads weren't great, but we made it without incident. We met up with Margaret's son, Jack, and a New Zealand burger joint and ate ridiculously tall food. I had the weirdest thing on the menu, the Kiwi Burger, which among other things, had beet root, egg and pineapple on it. It was pretty good, though I could have used an ingredient or two that really popped. Despite all the unusual toppings, the whole thing was a bit bland.

The weather was not pleasant. Rather than wander around the streets, which seems to be our normal activity in Edinburgh, we decided to see a movie. We were trying to decide between Sherlock Holmes and Avatar and settled with the latter because it had an earlier showing. Avatar certainly lived up to my expectations: it had a vapid plot overlayed on the the best computer generated images money can buy. We saw it in 3D and that's probably the only way you'll want to see it too. Or you know, you could skip it. If this technology is truly as revolutionary as James Cameron believes, then you'll be seeing a lot more movies coming out that will look just as beautiful. And maybe one or two of their producers will actually bother hiring someone who can write a decent story.

The trip home is where the day's adventure began. It took us about 3 hours to go less than 10 miles. In order to get from Edinburgh to the north of Scotland, you have to cross over a large body of water. Like the Tappan Zee, there is only one convenient bridge and it is often quite busy. Saturday night, the snow and the extra traffic from discount shoppers caused things to come to a stand still. Two or three major roads come together just before the bridge, so it's impossible to tell where the problem started from. We never saw any accidents or even police, but it took us close to 5 hours to make a drive that normally takes one. Yuck!

Anyhoo, we are on our last day at Pillars. Our train leaves from Edinburgh at 3pm and we should arrive in Norwich at 8:22pm. Hopefully we will have access to a decent internet connection and the updates will continue!