Goodbye, Scotland

I was trying so hard to stay awake. We were about 30 minutes away from the English border, and I wanted to be at least semi-conscious when we left Scotland. I wanted to savor those last few moments of Scottishness (that’s not a word, sorry) because there was no guarantee that I would ever come here again. After feeling sad about that for a few minutes, I had a crazy idea.
I could live here, I thought. Grandma said European countries always need English teachers. After college, I’ll move to Edinburgh and get a job at that English school on the Royal Mile. I don’t need a fancy house; I’ll rent one of those apartments above the shops on the Royal Mile, and since I’d be able to walk to work, I wouldn’t need a car. Since I’d be paying rent, not a mortgage, and I wouldn’t have a car payment, it wouldn’t matter that I would probably make next to no money.
Then I realized that there were three problems with this plan: 1. It would matter that I’d make no money, because then I could never come back to visit, 2. I’d be living in a city where it can be 70 degrees one minute and 50 and raining the next, and 3. I wouldn’t be able to understand anyone’s Scottish accent.
Oh well. I tried.
I was awake when we crossed into England. I had been resting my eyes, but then Pa said, “Entering England!” and I woke up just in time to see the sign fly by. Unfortunately, between the jolting of the car and the blaring of a super-annoying British talk show, I couldn’t go back to sleep. Instead, I sat there and listened to the idiots on the radio as the 6 hour drive to Stonehenge slowly crawled by.
“There it is,” Pa said, and sure enough, as we drove over that last hill, a circle of giant stones came into view. I couldn’t believe it. To me, Stonehenge was always the picture you saw in National Geographic or in your history book. It didn’t seem like a real thing, and I never in a million years thought that I’d ever get close enough to see the moss growing on the stones.
They were giving out those free audio tour things at the entrance, and even though I’ve always laughed at the people who walk around museums with those things glued to their ears, I decided to be a hypocrite and take one. I figured if I didn’t, I’d just be staring at a pile of stones while everyone around me had some great wisdom imparted on them by a little plastic rectangle.
I think the one thing that left the biggest impression on me was the fact that Stonehenge was built so that the stones lined up perfectly with each other and with the rising and setting sun. There’s a stone a few dozen yards away from Stonehenge, called the Heel Stone, that points straight towards the axis of Stonehenge. On the longest day of the year, the sun rises right behind the Heel Stone and shines through one of the rock archways straight into the center of Stonehenge. The sunset on the shortest day of the year shines through an archway directly across from the one illuminated by the Summer Solstice. Also, you can tell what month it is by which arch the sun’s light shines through. This would have been a pretty complicated thing to do today, but Stonehenge was started in about 2500 B.C. How could they have possibly figured out how to align the circle with the sun? Pa once told me how he believed they did it, and it involved aliens coming down to Earth to help the incompetent cavemen.
I really don’t think that’s it, but now that I’ve publicly dismissed his theory, the aliens are probably going to appear to me and tell me all about building Stonehenge.
We only had an hour and a half of driving left after Stonehenge, so we said goodbye to the rocks and the weird Druid guy standing by the fence with a “Bring Back Our Dead Ancestors” poster and began the final drive to London. Now, even though I’ve given Pa a hard time on this blog about his driving, I’ve got to give him a lot of credit. Driving on the wrong side of the road, on the wrong side of the car, and working a stick shift with the wrong hand is a lot harder than it may seem. And we got here alive, didn’t we?
We had left for Stonehenge early so we could have an extra day in London, but by the time we got there, we were all so exhausted that we ate dinner and went straight to bed. We’re staying in a huge hotel that charges you for just about everything, in a room with a lovely view of the airport parking lot. It’s not fantastic, but it at least it has hand towels (unlike a certain hotel in Portsoy…)! That’s really what counts, right?
Love,
Kiera