Planes, Trains, and Taxis

Jet Lag. It's a real thing. Not only does it affect your sleep patterns, but your emotions and your clear thinking skills. Let's start from the beginning.

We arrived in St Andrews on Sunday, September 4th at 6:30 PM. It wasn't that simple, however. The jouney began with our families caravaning with us down to Sea-Tac airport at 1:00 PM on Saturday, September 3rd. Just seeing those dates tells you that we traveled for about 24 hours. No sleep, 400 pounds of luggage, and 4 security checks. That encompasses our trip. Most of my time was spent playing Scrabble on the iPad, and Garrick read the Economist. We flew to Iceland and then to Glasgow, Scotland, and both flights, my touch screen movie player didn't work. I got to watch other people enjoy multiple movies on the trans-Atlantic flights. You can only play so much Scrabble. Now I'll get to the exhausting part of the journey:

Overcrowded trains.

I think we'll have nightmares for a few weeks about this. I would like to publicly proclaim my admiration and respect for my husband, who, in Sorel snow boots, carried his large backpacking pack, a fifty pound duffel on one shoulder and a 70 pound duffel on the other. Our taxi driver thoughtfully dropped us off in the town centre of Glasgow, and we walked up a small hill to the train station. I have never gotten so many weird looks and cared so little. We bought our tickets and when it was our time to board, mobs of people fled to the train entrances. We had to take up an entire landing of one of the entrances, to the dismay of the train porter. We explained that we had to bring the luggage, and somehow he decided to have mercy on us tired Americans.

Relief came when we loaded all of our belongings in the final taxi to St Andrews. Our driver pulled up in a Volkswagen Jetta and we told him thanks, but there's no way our stuff would fit. Then he proceeded to put all our stuff in the trunk. He knew a lot about the town, even gave us a map with shortcuts from our flat to town. He pulled up to 46 Langlands Road and we were left with all of our luggage on the curb. We opened our gate, walked up the path and turned the key.

Silence.

(10 minutes)

Tears.

No, not Garrick. I started crying. Before I get to the positives of our now beloved flat, I only saw its flaws. A kitchen straight from the 1950's, no bathtub, and one musty bedroom. Garrick frantically cleaned while I sat on our love seat and cried. Then I got in my sleeping bag on the floor and cried some more. I think staying up for 24 hours and a stressful traveling experience did it to me.

Today, we're sitting at Starbucks downtown St Andrews and are in good spirits. We've made our flat "home" and really find it charming. It has a front door, and an inside door, (I think that's common here,) a large bathroom, a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, and my personal favorite, a hardwood sun room with cute yellow curtains. We are almost finished decorating, cleaning and rearranging and will post pics soon of the finished product. I tried to post pics twice to the blog and both times it didn't go through, so if you are interested go to my facebook page!