One of my friends from acro, Kesh, lives in London for part of the year. He wanted to visit Scotland and he invited me, Felix, and our friend Khaos to go with him. The plan was to spend a few days with him in London and then drive around Scotland. 

On Tuesday evening, Felix, Khaos and I took a red eye flight to London. We got to Kesh’s apartment around 10am and I slept for a few hours. In the evening we went to a local acro class. Afterward we went to a jazz bar for dinner. I tried to order a Shirley Temple to drink and was disappointed to find that they aren’t a thing here. We took a double decker bus to get back to Kesh’s apartment, which I found exciting. This wasn’t a super eventful day. Literally the only photo I took was of an interestingly shaped manhole cover. 

The second day Felix and I split off because Khaos and Kesh had to work. We wanted to go to the British Museum and upon arriving, we found out that the museum is free but they do timed entry tickets. The soonest entry we could get was in two hours, so to fill the time we did some sight seeing. We walked down to the river and saw the London eye, Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey. I didn’t particularly care about any of these landmarks. I just felt obligated to see some classic London stuff while in London. I don’t really have anything to say about them. The streets were really crowded and it was hot out so this wasn’t a super pleasant experience.

We walked by the British Supreme Court building and there was a statue of Abraham Lincoln outside it. They didn’t have a plaque or anything explaining why the statue was there. Strange. 

Finally we walked back to the British museum and got to go inside. One of the first things we saw was the Rosetta Stone which Felix was impressed by. 

We saw the Benin Bronzes which were featured in an episode of Last Week Tonight about the British Museum and how it has all these artifacts acquired from conquest and the original owners would like them back. 

In the China section I saw some displays that looked straight out of my Grandma’s house. 

Overall it was a pretty cool museum. I brought a sweater because museums are usually cold but I discovered that they don’t have any air conditioning. I guess they’re fine just letting their artifacts melt. 

After the museum we met up with Kesh and Khaos to see a West End production of Wicked. I’ve been wanting to see it for a while and thought it was pretty good. I was wondering if they’d speak in American accents because it’s an American musical and they did not.

The next morning we went to Camden market for lunch/breakfast. It’s an open air market with a ton of vendors in small booths selling all kinds of food. There was plenty of food there that looked good but I found it too overwhelming to actually get anything. There were so many options and every time I started looking at a menu the people in the shop would aggressively start offering me samples. Felix noticed a shop selling fire spinning equipment and we spent some time in there admiring the stuff.

Next, Felix, Khaos and I headed to the museum of natural history. The museum was very crowded and weirdly hot (air conditioning just isn’t a thing in London apparently). I’ve been to a number of natural history museums and the only thing really notable about this one is that it had quite a large collection of dinosaur skeletons and fossils. Particularly, it had a ton of plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs. So many that they filled two large walls with just those skeletons. Apparently a lot of these aquatic dinosaurs were found in the UK. 

There was one sandstone rock that I really liked because it looked like a sculpture but it was natural. 

In the evening, we met back up with Kesh and did some Acro. Felix and I took a break for dinner and ended up wandering around London for a while looking for a place to eat. In the UK, my phone had enough service to send text messages but not enough to look anything up. We walked through a really fancy neighborhood, which had no affordable dinner prospects, and finally settled for eating at the Hard Rock Cafe because it was the first reasonable thing we came across. Felix got a huge salad and said it was his best meal in London. 

The next morning, we got up at 4:30 to catch an early train to Edinburgh. I immediately liked Edinburgh much more than London. The city has cool old buildings, is less crowded, and was less hot than London. We got a rental car, parked it, and then walked through the city to get lunch. 

Felix, Kesh, and Khaos got traditional Scottish breakfasts and I tried some. This included haggis, which we all thought was pretty good, and black pudding (sheep’s blood) which we all agreed was bad. 

Our time in the city took longer than expected and we got a 50 pound parking ticket. Little did we know this was just the beginning of our bad luck. More on that later…

We drove out of the city and stopped at Abby and a park with a view of a castle on an island. 

This trick is called “Cathedral”

For dinner, we stopped in a small town and ate fish and chips in the rain. It felt very Scottish. I got chicken but I tried the fried haddock and found it tasted like fish so I didn’t like it. We kept driving and made an unplanned stop at a loch (Scottish word for lake). I liked that there were big green mountains and a ton of fog. It felt very Scottish. 

Felix noticed a little waterfall across the road and discovered a cool stream in the forest. 

We finally arrived at our BnB around 10. The place was super cute and had a nice view of the sunset over the sea. The sun sets super late during the summer in Scotland. 

The next morning, we made our first stop at Eilean Donan Castle. The original castle is pretty old but it was destroyed at some point and then some guy bought it in 1911 and spent 20 years restoring it. The inside of the castle is a museum and you’re not allowed to take pictures inside, which is fine because the museum was really lame. It was mostly about the reconstruction of the castle. This castle has a cool exterior and that’s about it. 

We stopped at a cool waterfall by the side of the road. The Scottish landscape was really beautiful and reminded me of Lord of the Rings. 

Next, we did a hike called the Old Man of Storr, which is in the Isle of Skye. This hike is really popular and takes you up to some cool rock pinnacles. 

We’re being the three rocks.

When we took this photo, some random person shouted “do a handstand” and I said “not here”

After the hike, we drove to the town of Portree to get lunch. This is where the trip really took a turn. Felix was driving the rental car and hit what was essentially a big pot hole which made a big bump but seemed to be fine. Upon arriving in the town we saw that the front left tire was flat and the rental car did not have a spare tire. We got lunch and when we came back to the car we saw that the back left tire was flat as well. We drove to a gas station and tried to fill the tires up but they kept deflating so we knew they were punctured. We tried to find a autoshop but it was a Sunday and basically everything was closed. We finally arranged for the rental car agency to send us a tow truck, but the truck was coming from far away and wouldn’t get us for a few hours. This sucked because there were a bunch of cool things we had planned for the day, but we ended up spending some chill time in the Portree. 

Felix and I went into a knitwear shop and bought a scarf of the Colquhoun tartan. According to a poster in the shop, the last name Ingram comes from the Colquhoun clan, and I had to represent my clan. We went to a restaurant where Felix, Kesh, and Khaos sampled some local scotch. 

We also went to a park that overlooked a loch and did some acro. 

Finally, our tow truck driver arrived. He said he could either tow us to our next hotel, in Fort William, or he could take us a bit out of the way to his autoshop where they could probably fix the car that same night. We opted to get the car fixed. 

The tow truck took us to a really small town on Loch Carron, which was not so much a town as a collection of ten buildings. The only thing open was the bar at an inn so we went there while we waited for the car to be fixed. Their restaurant had closed but their chef kindly offered some soup and sandwiches. We made small talk with the bar tender who was very friendly. This was a cool experience because it felt genuine as opposed to super touristy. We got to spend time in a little pub where Scottish people actually hang out and they were just being friendly and kind to us.

Then we found out that one of the car wheels was broken and the autoshop could not fix it tonight. This, obviously, was a huge disappointment as it meant none of our Scotland plans were salvageable. All they could do was tow us to our hotel, which they did, and we got there around 2am. 

Our hotel was a tiny inn at the base of Ben Nevis, which is the tallest mountain in the UK. Khaos actually woke up at 4am and went on a 5-hour hike up the mountain. Kesh and Felix spent the morning trying to call the rental car company to figure out how we could get back to Edinburgh. There were no restaurants open anywhere near us so we ended up taking a little walk to the Ben Nevis visitor center to buy snacks for breakfast. This walk took us through a bunch of fields of sheep. We saw a TON of sheep while in Scotland but this was the first time I could get close to them. 

When a tow truck finally came to get us, they hadn’t communicated to the driver that there were four of us, and he didn’t have room for us in the truck so he just took the car and we were left to find our own way back to Edinburgh. We thought we could take a bus to a bus to a train so we walked with our suitcases 1.5 miles down a road to a bus stop. When the bus came, it just drove right by us. We later learned we had to have reservations or something. Finally we called around and found a taxi that would take us back to Edinburgh for 300 pounds so we did that. 

We got to Edinburgh with some time to spare before our train so we found a place to store our luggage and then walked around. We went to a park and did some acro. The park was high on a hill so you could see a lot of the city but I didn’t think it was particularly scenic compared to what we had just seen in Scotland. It was pretty crowded for some reason, there were a bunch of people there shooting an Indian movie or music video. It was like a big party scene and really didn’t make sense why it was happening in that park. 

We got on our train back to London and at King’s Cross Station, I got a picture with the sign for platform 9 and 3/4 (this is a thing in Harry Potter). It was against a random wall because the actual platforms 9 and 10 don’t have a wall between them. 

The next day, we went to the airport to get on a flight back to the Boston. This should have been the end of the story. We got to the airport 2.5 hours before the flight, but the airport was super crowded because it was still experiencing issues from the CloudStrike thing. I think their online check in tool still wasn’t working, so everyone had to check in at the airport and there were huge lines. It took us two hours to check our bags and then we couldn’t get through security because it was too close to the takeoff time. Trying to get a new flight was a nightmare. None of the airport staff seemed to know what to do so they kept telling us to get in different lines. We’d be in one line and then a staff member would ask us what we were in line for and then say “no, you’re supposed to be in that line” or “you have to re-book online” or “you have to re-book over the phone.” We couldn’t re-book online and their phone lines were so busy they wouldn’t even put us on hold. Buying new tickets would have been $2,500 each so we couldn’t do that. We ended up splitting up to stand in different lines because we didn’t know which one was correct. The lines were soooo slow moving. In my line, there was some agent on the phone trying to help people get re-booked and it took two hours to help one customer. After that, the agent just left and we had to join another line. We did a bit of acro to entertain ourselves while we waited. 

Finally we got an agent who could re-book our flight but the soonest flight to Boston with multiple seats was two days later on Thursday evening, but we had to take it. We couldn’t get our checked bags back so on the way back to Kesh’s apartment, we stopped at the mall to buy necessities. I just spent the next two days working remotely. We got to the airport six hours early for our Thursday flight and it seemed everything had calmed down by this point. The only notable thing that happened is that Khaos tried to bring a jar of nutella in their carry-on and it got flagged by security. They had to eat it with their fingers while the security agent held onto their passport as collateral. We made it back to Boston safely and I am so happy to be home. 

So yeah…This is definitely the worst luck I’ve ever had on a trip. I think I’m going to stick to travelling within the US for a while.