2019 UK Trip – Day 8 (St. Andrews)
Welcome to my blog home. I am glad you have dropped in! I write about many things here. My passion is helping others “untangle” their minds and bodies so they can freely live out the calling on their lives. I fully believe fear, anxiety, and stress rob people daily and I am tired of watching it. So here I am, sharing my story in hopes to teach others that they can overcome whatever it is that keeps them from running full-on into their lives.
Speaking of full-on… my husband and I took a trip overseas to visit universities that he might attend to get his PhD. This blog post picks back up midway through the trip. If this is your first visit here, click here to see all the posts about our 2019 UK Trip. You can go back and read from the very beginning if you would like. Maybe you just want to bookmark them for those free moments when you want to grab your phone and chill. (By the way – I write the trip posts in present tense so it feels like you’re experiencing it in real time. We’ve made it back home safely to the US.)
Day 8… I think!
Today is going to be a great day! The weather is perfect. My coffee is wonderful! And… my little black boats still are doing great for me. Eric and I plan to keep it simple today. We are going to visit downtown stores, go to the famous St. Andrews golf course, and check out the beach again. Really, that is it! We leave tomorrow for London so we will pack up tonight. But for this day, we are taking it slow.
We start with a brunch at a restaurant downtown. It’s next door to Forgan’s, the place in the old golf club factory where we had dinner the first night here. Our meal at Forgan’s was incredible! This place looks like it will be too. After waiting a few minutes to be seated, we order. It’s 11:00AM now. I order a Caesar salad with salmon and Eric orders the “full Scottish breakfast.” He had it at The Elephant House in Edinburgh and liked it. He wants to try something called black pudding, which is often part of this breakfast. He hasn’t had it yet.
Our food comes out pretty quickly. My salad looks so yummy… but it has let me down! I am trying to eat it, but it tastes incredibly fishy. I know, you’re thinking, “It has salmon on it! What did you expect?” Eric says it’s OK to ask the waitress if I can get one without salmon, so I did. Why do I have to make things so complicated? Over 15 years of marriage, Eric has learned to be so patient with me.
While we’re waiting on my salad to come back, Eric is eating his breakfast. He really likes that the Scottish breakfast comes with a mushroom and a tomato. His tastes are sometimes a little weird for south Georgia but seem to fit well here. He tries his black pudding… and doesn’t like it very much. After a few bites, he says he doesn’t want anymore. Then he tells me what it is. Apparently, it’s not pudding at all… it’s a type of sausage called a “blood sausage.” That’s why it’s black – because it’s full of cooked blood! GROSS!!! He can eat most anything, but he says he won’t order black pudding again.
So my salad comes back and I try to eat it again. Key word – try! It still tastes very fishy. I figure they just took the salmon off and sent the salad back and I’m still tasting it. Eric takes a bite and said even he couldn’t eat it. Then he remembers that Caesar dressing has anchovies in it! He says that the Caesar dressing we’re used to at home also has anchovies but doesn’t taste so strong. The waitress sees that I’m not eating it and comes over to check on me. She’s so sweet! She apologizes and says that there’s nothing they can do about the anchovies in the dressing. It’s OK. Not every meal in the UK is wonderful, I guess!
After brunch, we take a pleasant, slow walk down to the golf course. The part of the course we’re looking at is called The Old Course. As I mentioned before, St. Andrews is the birthplace of golf. We are looking at the world’s oldest golf course. I am a full believer that if you have seen one golf course you have seen them all, but people come from all over the world to play golf right here on this very course. It looked so incredibly normal to me. I am aware that it is the history that draws like-minded people to this place. It is the story and the years of existence that makes the avid golfer travel the world to tee off here. Are we not all like that? We love a good story. It draws us in. We love the richness of history and the consistency it gives us. So I will not poke fun that one of the most famous golf courses looks just like the one back home. Ok… minus the beach!
Speaking of the beach, that’s where Eric and I are now. Just a few feet from the course is this beautiful sea. Eric and I climb over some rocks to find the perfect place to sit a while. It is wonderful. The sun has come out and there is a light breeze. We lay back on the rocks to soak in the sun and soon we found ourselves napping. We wake to kids playing near us. One kids yells out “Hi! You can’t sleep there! It’s not comfortable at all!” We got a good laugh out of that. We were very comfortable and could have stayed all day but the clock was moving so we needed to also. Do you ever just wish you had a pause button to hold everything still for a moment more? Yeah, I wish I had that button for this moment!
We are back at the flat enjoying our last meal together in St. Andrews. We chose to stay in again for dinner. Tomorrow we will get up and catch a bus that will take us to the train station. We will be on our way to London. We are just going there to sightsee. We will not be looking at any schools there. Eric and I are both getting a little homesick. We have two more days before we fly home so we are going to push on and make the most of it.
(Side note… you may have noticed in most of my pictures it appears I am wearing the same thing. Good eye! I spent time doing clothing research before we left. What I found for the weather here is that it is best to start with a base layer and build on that. My base layer would change but the outside layers stayed the same. This made packing and getting dressed each day so easy for me. I plan to do a stand-alone post on this topic.)
