Driving Scotland

Well to get th important statistics out of the way. At the end my driving ended up with 0 cars, 0 curbs, 0 people, and 0 animals. In other words I managed to not hit anything for one day. Obviously I am off to an awesome start. Monday will be tougher as we will be visiting castles and a distillery, which probably mean smaller roads.

Driving in Scotland can be summed up in a single word – civilized. There were no wild drivers, everyone pulled to the left and kept the right lane clear for faster cars, which I was only occasionally. I’m not sure they could survive driving in the states. Especially in LA or New York.

My only real issue was that if I didn’t pay close attention, I found my self drifting to the left as I tried to line myself up with left hand line. Not too smart when the steering wheel is on the right. I probably only scared Helen 4 or 5 times, and learned that she really doesn’t like looking out her window and see a big Lorry inches from her face.

Also learned that Nokia Here Drive Beta sucks. I installed it on my phone with the intention of using it as our Nav software while here in the UK. Surprise!! Because I don’t have a Nokia phone I am only authorized to use their software in the states. So here we are 5000 miles from home and wondering how we are going to get around. Fortunately I found an App that will read the Nokia Maps and use them for Navigation. This eventually worked fine. Although when we first started using it, Left was Right and Right was Left. This made driving VERY confusing for awhile. It eventually sorted itself out and now all is right with the world.

In Aberdeen, we checked into our Hotel – The Skene House Whitehall, we were given a tour of the bellman offered to help us get our luggage from the car and show us to our room. That was nice, especially when he told us we were on the 3rd floor and there was no elevator. Now for you uninitiated in Europe the Ground Floor is not the 1st floor, it’s the Ground Floor. This means we had to haul luggage up 3 flights of stairs.  Being Double O (Old and Out of Shape) this was not a fun prospect. Fortunately he took the heavy bag and I managed to drag mine upstairs without collapsing.

Or room is very Scandinavian like, which is different. But for the most part okay. After dropping the bags off we headed downstairs to the front desk to ask for recommendations for places to eat. Turns out it’s not something any other guest has ever done. Well that’s what I assumed based on the deer in the headlights look we received from both people behind the counter. Fortunately after a little coaxing they sent us off in a good direction and we found an interesting Tapas Restaurant/Bar. Where we walked into an establishment that had room for over a hundred and we brought the non staff population up to 2. A little disturbing. But the food was okay. More on that on my Celiac page later.

So now off to the Castles.