June 15-16, SF, NYC, Edinburgh, Pitlochry

The first leg of our travel! I’m writing this on June 17th (and maybe soon I’ll get caught up and start writing day-of, but for now we are on a tape delay. Early (like really early) we got a ride to SFO for our 7am flight to JFK. I’m excited about going to Scotland, but there’s basically no way to do this nonstop, so the choice was that or something to London with a long train ride. Maybe next time- I like train rides, but this was pretty simple. It also meant I could work most of the day Monday (writing stuff on the plane, having meetings from NY during the layover), which - I have burned all my PTO for this trip, so an extra day is nice.

“Hey boss, I made the magazine holder just like you asked. It’s actually impossible to reach in and grab anything you might have put inside it, like a phone or whatever.” “Great, now set up the seat so there’s nowhere to put anything else, and we’ll be rolling in the forgotten phones” (I ended up remembering, but having to sort of shove my phone up from below by squeezing from the outside. It was wild.

Anyway, I know this might sound a little mountain / molehill or whatever, since I’m about to complain about a first class seat, but I need to complain a little about a first class seat here. I swear, the Delta execs had a choice, they could have added something like three or four inches of pitch (the space between passenger rows) here and had a great experience. But instead, there’s this pretty nice seat that is very hard to get in to because the opening to the aisle is super-narrow. There’s also literally nowhere to put your stuff, except in the above-photographed magazine slide. Because we fancy, we get a bottle of water and a little bag with a toothbrush and stuff when you get on the plane, but there’s not even a cupholder let alone a place to stash your phone etc. Every other first class cabin I’ve been in (like three, lol) had a little cabinet for storage, that importantly closed and had a dim LED on the interior. If you’re going to sleep, it’s great to have a safe and stable place to put your glasses.

There wasn’t even anywhere to store the blankets. I think there’s some kind of design school that needs to consider basic user needs. I love having a blanket on a flight, but on the 7am flight from SFO I wasn’t going to use the bed function of the seat, so i just had to kind of awkwardly keep moving the pillow around. Oh dang, I sure am complaining about first class. Sorry, I’ll stop. Plus side: I got some sleep on the flight to Edinburgh, and wasn’t too spacy when we got off the plane.

We got the RV, they didn’t even look at our international drivers licenses (the company website was all doom and gloom about us not having them, so we freaked out but luckily the AAA has same day service on Saturday, so we got those done). Reader: driving an RV for two hours (give or take) after a pretty long day of travel was certainly exciting. This is a very wide vehicle, and in Scottish towns, people just park up half on the sidewalk, leaving kind of 1.5 lanes left? And my really full-width van, let me say: I did not spend any extra time in town on day one. Still it’s a nice RV and I love the freedom of it all.

The freedom is great. We stayed one night at a campground in Pitlochry, drove around a little today, and are staying in a different campground as I type this (more about today, tomorrow). All of the campgrounds have enough open sites that you can just trundle in without a reservation, and if anything does fill up, there’s a bunch of more rustic options where they’ll let you park for the night, you just don’t get to plug in and have a nice building to wash your dishes. So, we:

• Got off the plane, taxi to the RV pickup. It is remarkably easy to get out of that airport. You can tell, because I am remarking about it. Automatic passport control, and the taxi process smooth - you give your destination to the attendant, and the automated system has a cab show up with your destination preprogrammed. All of the things I used to love about rideshare apps, but you know, for taxis.

• Drive around in the outskirts of Edinburgh and nearly crash like only maybe once. Panic and skip the first grocery store when there’s no real parking for a giant thing.

• Go to another grocery store, shop into a basket because I didn’t have a pound coin for a wheelie cart.

• Successfully shop for two dinners plus some lunches and breakfasts. This is huge; our first shopping trip in iceland got us buttermilk instead of regular milk, and a dinner that was only onions and sausage, because we’d both just been so tired. Scotland was better.

• Drive to Pitlochry, only brushing the side of the road like four or five times. I remembered which side I was supposed to drive on the whole way though. Because I was constantly muttering: “look right, turn left, into the left lane.”

• Got our campsite!

We went out for a walk, and immediately got lost. Like there was a sign showing two paths, one left and one right. And instead of following the little spur to the path, we just cut across and ended up on a private road. The road went by Faskally House (above, many bun), which was a manor house at one point but now is a kind of retreat / camp place for churchy folks. If you want to do a bible study in Scotland, I’ve got the manor house for you to rent. It was lovely from the outside though, and eventually the road intersected with the river path we were supposed to be on, which, look at it. It was a path we had to tread. That’s some gorgeous stuff right there.

After that, dinner (sausage penne), wash up, the first episode of Heated Rivalry (my first watch-through, Chrissy’s third time). Then some planning for our next day (we decided to only stay one night in that campground, tried to make some other reservations for stuff like sheepdog demonstrations, looked at maps, found out we were just too late or too early for some stuff, and made a plan for tomorrow, which is today as I write this, but I’ll write about today tomorrow).