June 1, 2014 — Northumberland, England

Near the northern border of England, we visited The Holy Island and Lindisfarne Castle.

Lindisfarne is on a tidal island, only accessible at certain times of the day. For about half of the day, the tides come in and down out the roads and walking paths to the island. As such, you have to be aware of tidal activity and time your stay to make sure you can get on and then off of the island without delays.

A monastery was founded on the island in 634 and became a base for Christian evangelizing in the North of England for centuries afterwards. There were some lulls in activity after constant Viking raids in the 800s-1100s.  People got tired of being killed and decided perhaps it would be better to live elsewhere for 400 years.

In 1901, this castle had been abandoned.  Edward Hudson, the founder of Country Life magazine, went on holiday in Northumberland.  “He scaled the walls, fell in love with the deserted Castle and it’s location … and bought it from the Crown.”  He hired some Arts & Crafts designers and renovated the building into a summer home.

Today, the castle is almost exactly the same as it was circa 1910, with all of Hudson’s original furnishings (including dishes, kitchenware, bedding, etc.)  It’s basically a time capsule of a rich family’s lifestyle from the turn of the century.  They hosted quite a few famous musicians, artists and authors, including J.M. Barrie (Peter Pan), the war poet Seigfried Sassoon, and Lytton Strachley.

I’d never heard of Lytton Strachley, but he sounds like a jerk.  “He found himself so bored with the company of the other guests he resigned himself to the fact that ‘the only thing to do was get altogether drunk.'”  He also complained about the accommodations, saying that being surrounded by so much stone was bad for ones nerves, and that the stone and brick floors were so uneven that one slip could be deadly.  (Being “altogether drunk” may have had something to do with it.)

Everyone else seemed to have a good time as Hudson’s guests.  One lady, a famous cellist named Madame Suggia, would stay for weeks at a time.  Another lady, Ms. Turner, once stayed on for 8 months.

There is no vehicle access.  It seems most of these old castles require a bit of a hike.  They are also not handicap accessible.  If you can’t walk, you can’t go.

The kitchen, exactly as it looked in 1910.  All the kitchenware belonged to the Hudsons.  It was fun to see how a castle would have actually been lived in.

This is the Ship Room.  From what I can tell, it’s their version of a living room or family room.  They had a collection of board games, books, and other entertainments in here.

View from one of the terraces.

We’re not in Scotland yet, but pretty close to the border.  This guy playing the bag pipes was a busker.  Depending on the direction of the wind, you could hear him from quite a long distance away.  It made for a very neat soundtrack for the hike up to the castle.  It created an atmosphere that made you feel like you were in a period-piece movie.

Lindisfarne Priory … or what’s left of it.  This is in the town.  In this photo, we’re all peering into an old well.

We spent the rest of the afternoon driving to Edinburgh and checking into our new apartment.  This one is a bit of a disappointment … we rented it because Adam’s parents are joining us in two days and the description of the flat said it can accommodate 10 people.  (We’ll have 7.)

The place is very, very tiny.  We’re already cramped with 5 … but we’ll make do because the location is so fabulous.  It’s one block away from the Royal Mile and a very short walk to Edinburgh Castle.  The area is alive with restaurants, cashmere shops, whiskey shops, kilt designers, grocery stores, drug stores, post office, antique shops, books sellers, jewelers, launderettes, banks — and any other amenity you could imagine needing.

On a personal note, I always gain some weight on vacations — restaurant food, and way too much temptation in the way of treats and wine.  So, for the past few months I’ve made an effort to get to the bottom of my weight range so I’d start the trip with some wiggle room, and I came up with a plan to stay healthy while on the road.  I bought some resistance bands for exercising — they are lightweight and can be tossed into a suitcase ($12 on amazon.com), and require very little space to use.

When we’re gone for 8 weeks at a time, the “but we’re on vacation!” excuse for indulgence turns into something really ugly.  I can already tell my pants are getting tighter (ugh! how does it happen so fast??)  I’ve been slacking off with my resistance bands so far, with the justification that we’ve been doing so much walking.  Clearly I’m not going to get away with that.  Tonight I busted out the bands and did my exercises.  I really need to be disciplined about this.  Starting today.

June 2, 2014 — Edinburgh

This morning while rooting through his suitcase to find a clean pair of pants, Holden found Josie’s lost brass pig.  How it got in there is a complete mystery, but we’re all glad to have it back.  Josie has been harboring resentment towards Adam for the past 36 hours over his refusal to alter our itinerary to drive all the way back to Beamish so she could buy another one.

Here is a picture of the pig — it’s about the size of an acorn.  (It looks quite a bit larger in the photo.)  But now we have a photo to remember it by when it inevitably gets lost again.

Last summer on our USA tour, Josie had this problem with her little pocket knife.  She lost that thing over and over and over again … and to our amazement she managed to find it every time.  It would be gone for days and then turn up in the strangest places, but it never got left behind.  It’s now safely in her jewelry box at home in her room.  Maybe her phenomenally freaky good luck will hold over this summer with the brass pig.  If she makes it home with this thing, I’m going to start having Josie buy lottery tickets.

Today was our first whole day in Edinburgh.  We wanted to avoid some of the more famous locations (Edinburgh Castle, etc.) because John and Elaine will want to see them in a couple of days.

This morning we did some shopping — new coats for Holden and Josie (Josie didn’t have a warm coat and Holden had outgrown his)– and a really nice lunch at Jamie Oliver’s Italian restaurant (called Jamie’s Italian).  Adam found a french press and some coffee to improve his mornings (he has been drinking instant up to this point) and we got a bottle of wine to enjoy after dinner.

Weird side note: for the past couple of days, I’ve been searching drug stores for a simple bottle of hydrogen peroxide.  It’s awesome for staving off zits (Isabella is 14, after all) and cleaning red wine stains out of white upholstery (my fault … the side table had a strange lip on it and caught the bottom of my glass) and I haven’t been able to find hydrogen peroxide anywhere.  Today I finally asked a pharmacist if they carried it, and she told me that it’s a prescription-only substance in the UK.  Mind. Blown.  I looked it up on the internet when I got back to the apartment and discovered that terrorists can use it for making bombs.  Mystery solved.  Terrorists ruin everything.

Having nothing else to do in the afternoon, we decided to try the Edinburgh Dungeon.  It is an elaborate haunted house, with some rides and a lot of actors doing scary bits. There is some history thrown in there as well, but it’s heavily dosed with cheesy scary items and gross descriptions.  The kids just loved it. Josie had several moments where she needed a hand to hold, and that made the visit worth the price of admission alone.

The “story” is built around several famous Scottish serial killers.  One is the story of Burke & Hare, a couple of guys who made their living illegally digging up cadavers to sell to medical schools.  In 1828, they realized that digging up graves is time consuming and hard work, and it’s much easier to just kill someone above ground.  (Plus, Hare had been run out of his own hometown because “He was always remarkable for being of a ferocious and malignant disposition, an instance of which he gave in the killing of one of his Master’s horses, which obliged him to fly to Scotland…” so there was probably an element of fun in the murdering for him, which would have been sadly missing in just digging up the previously deceased.)

These two had a schtick going where they would find desperate-looking people after closing time and offer them a stiff drink and a bed, free of charge.  Once they had the victim in their apartment, they would keep pouring the whiskey until the victim passed out.  Then one guy would pinch the nose and mouth shut while the other would sit on the chest, smothering the person … leaving a perfect, unmarked and unwounded body for the medical school.  It was known as “burking.”  They finally got caught after their 16th victim.

Another story was of the Sawney Bean family.  They were a clan of incestuous cannibals living in a series of caves.  They would murder and eat travelers, and legend has it they killed well over a hundred people.

(From wikipedia:)  “…it was not long before King James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) heard of the atrocities and decided to lead a manhunt with a team of 400 men and several bloodhounds. They soon found the Beans’ previously overlooked cave in Bennane Head. The cave was scattered with human remains, having been the scene of many murders and cannibalistic acts.

The clan was captured alive and taken in chains to the Tolbooth Jail in Edinburgh, then transferred to Leith or Glasgow where they were promptly executed without trial; the men had their genitalia cut off, hands and feet severed and were allowed to bleed to death; the women and children, after watching the men die, were burned alive.”

In the Edinburgh Dungeon, they have actors tell these stories (and several others) and do things like dissect a fake body in a replica of an 1820s medical operating theatre.  They pull out all the intestines and slimy internal organs until they get to the bladder, and then ask the audience “aaaand what does a bladder contain?”  When some kid (in our case, Holden) calls out, “The bladder contains urine!” the actor squeezes the bladder, freshly pulled from the corpse, and squirts “urine” all over the audience while yelling, “And it looks like it’s still fuuuullllllll! *cackle cackle cackle*.”  It’s exactly the kind of thing that really brings history to life for the kids.

The final act of the Dungeon is to strap everyone into a mini Tower of Terror to give you a sense of what it would feel like to be hanged.  They snap a picture at the most stomach-lurching point of the drop (like they do for roller coasters) to capture everyone’s shocked and terrified faces.  It was the very best freaked-out-face photo we’ve ever seen.  The only problem is that they wanted £9 (US$15) for the picture.  We’d already paid £50 (US$83) to get in and were feeling like they should have included the photo in the price of admission.  At the very least, they could have charged something like £2 and still well covered their costs in paper and printer ink.  Anyway, we don’t have the photo.  We’ll have to be content with our memories of a fun time.

Some basic iPhone pics from today, since Adam didn’t carry the good camera ….

Photo below: In Jamie’s Italian.  I want a huge rack full of dried garlic, peppers, onions, and herbs in my own kitchen.  If I thought I could get away with it, my kitchen would look like a voodoo witch’s secret spell-making arboretum.   The only reason it doesn’t is that I’m worried about dust.  Nobody wants dusty garlic.

In case you can’t read the toilet tank [below], it says “Crapper’s valveless waste preventer.”  It was the coolest toilet tank we’ve ever seen.  (The flushing handle is right there in the middle.)  Holden couldn’t believe a toilet tank had the word Crapper on it.  This provided me the opportunity to regale the kids with factoids about Thomas Crapper.  I really want one of these for my house.

Holden and Josie modeling their new coats.  Both by Barbour … Josie loves hers because (real quote) “It reminds me of grandma’s jacket.” She’s anxious to show it off to grandma when they get to the airport tomorrow.  Holden’s is their waxed fabric line, which makes it virtually waterproof and very warm.  Most important to Holden, it has tons of pockets to hold all his stuff.  He carries lots of stuff.