After all the chores, I had the urge to sit quietly. Andrew and Nick were out exploring and I didn’t want to just hang around in the hotel alone, so I decided to bike to a nearby cinema and see the new Indiana Jones movie. Not bad! It was late on a Sunday and the movie had been out for a while, so I had the auditorium almost entirely to myself.
When I got out of the theater noticed a missed call from my nephew James, so I called him back and we chatted for about an hour. As we talked I rode the bike, turning randomly at intersections towards whatever seemed like the quieter part of town. Eventually I rolled to a stop outside a late-night bakery on Leith Walk.
The place had donuts filled with custard, as well as cheese and onion pasties, which I mispronounced as “pastries”. I bought one of each, then stood around on the sidewalk nibbling the chocolate off the top of the donut because I’m a “dessert forward” sort of eater, and in the meantime two people came up the sidewalk trailing an enormous shaggy dog on a long leash. One of them went to in to buy snacks, and only a few moments later the proprietor came out with a small steak pie and sat it on the ground in front of the dog, who leaned down and ate it in one bite, then licked the sidewalk for a while as the humans chatted.
As I stowed my remaining snack and got on the bike, I heard one of the dog owners explain to the proprietor that she was worried for her housemate, because he had smoked way too much pot, and then started rolling back and forth on the floor repeatedly insisting that he was “an egg.” Her tone implied true concern, and I couldn’t decide if that was actually more hilarious than the antics of the pot smoker.
It only took five minutes to zig-zag my way back to the rental, and I spent the time chatting again with James while chewing on a warm onion and cheese pasty. When I stood up from the bike a small pile of crumbs tumbled off the front of my jacket.
The rest of the crew was already inside and settling down for the night. The weather was warm enough for us to leave the window open, and for a while I watched the birds churn around in the sky. We were technically as far north here as the southern tip of Alaska, so it never got truly dark.
We found a cafe in the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, and ate a buffet breakfast sitting at the windows, with the bikes parked outside in view. As usual, lots of pedestrians stopped to scope out the recumbents, look confused, then move on.
Since we had to switch hotels in the evening, we had all our touring gear packed back on the bikes. It was annoying but we got by.
They walked from place to place in a big group, stopping at arranged locations and giving 15-minute performances. We saw them half a dozen times at least.
The Royal Mile is by far the busiest street in Edinburgh.
Every three blocks or so, a different person was stationed, playing the bagpipes. The effect was almost spiritual, like after 700 years of the instrument playing in this region (possibly as much as 3000 years), the sound of bagpipes was infused into the very stones and just vibrated out like heat.
The new hotel was on the north side of town, and our room was up three flights of stairs. There was no elevator, so we had to haul the bikes all the way.
When we settled in, the extra height was refreshing though. I opened the windows and was treated to a night time performance:
Dawn broke cold and damp, but we were expecting that. We all awoke around the same time and packed our gear in a steady drizzle. There was some mud to wash off from the late riding the previous night.
As we rolled out of the campground we encountered the manager, and he charged us a very reasonable fee for the space and water. We got to chatting and he couldn’t help showing us the amazing car project he had brewing in the garage.
Back outside we reconfigured our rain gear. The weather service claimed the rain would stop, but the wind would remain stiff until we moved away from the coast a little.
