£28 Tickets for a Castle I Won’t Visit…Priceless

I carefully have avoided including any guided stops on our itinerary as the idea of hobbling along or trying to keep up the pace all the while attracting attention to the middle aged woman with grey fly-aways and the cane is just mortifying.  The most guided aspect of the trip will be escorting my daughter to the university and touring the campus and such.  

Another One Bites The Dust

As we (I) began planning this trip, I asked everyone to list out two places they had to see.  Kayla’s top place was not really specific, but that she wanted to see a place that was haunted.  She wanted to see a ghost – so she can know if they are real.  And we cycled through a few castles before settling on Edinburgh castle.  My cousin Brian told me that at very least the dungeons are creepy, even if no ghosts pop out at you.

So much to do, but not really

The more lackadaisical folk of the world, or even the less anal retentive bunches out there, would likely purchase their tickets, book their hotel and car rental and plot the points on a map – then be done with it.  Why can’t I be like them?

I have to research each place, seek out reviews and opinions and histories; write to local business owners to ask inane questions (likely further supporting the mentality that Americans are weird creatures) and plan for every imaginable not-so-happy ending that could occur; as well as calculate our drive times down to the mile and minute and plan our day out to that of a finely tuned machine.  You could ask me where we’ll be at 3:43 in the afternoon on the 12th of March and I can tell you down to the next nearest cross streets.  Why?

Nine and a Half Weeks…and counting

I feel like it is count down to the wedding all over again.  The anxiety and planning and double checking and re-budgeting and craziness could easily be mistaken for pre-wedding micro-management stress – but no.  No this stress is for a vacation, you know when you leave your worries behind and give a big FU to the bills and daily concerns you leave behind.  Yes, that wonderfully stressful thing called a vacation.  A dear friend, who is likewise planning a vacation of sorts, provided a nice excuse for all of this muss – I’ll worry about every minute being planned out now so that I can properly vacation without those worries then.  I think I will steal her excuse, it bodes well.