So I went up north, saw some stuff, came back, yadda yadda, end of story. I wish the journal was that easy. I need a secretary that i can dictate.
Dictate to. Or a thing that can read my thoughts and convert them to words on the internet. Maybe not, or at least not now, it'd just type 'yum yum yum yum yum yum yum yum yum yum yum yum yum..'
I'm always more focused on leaving a place than I am about where I'm headed. Perhaps if you don't know what's ahead of you, you can't think about it. I certainly can't, as it takes imagination, and once I start using my imagination it takes me to places where I'm incredibly successful and win at everything forever, like art and arson and the moon. So I spent my ride away from Edinburgh missing Edinburgh and all the awesome things that Edinburgh had, like shiny-mouth garbage men and shiny castles and that's about it really because I never properly experienced Edinburgh..
I crossed the Forth Road Bridge, which spans the Firth of Forth (haha, yeah, nah, in Scotlandish it means estuary of the Forth river, which opens into the North Sea), a 2.5 kilometer metal cable suspension bridge, very impressive. I should have taken a photo but like everything that I 'should' have photographed, I spent too much time thinking "hmm shall I pull over and take a pic? It'd look quite nice up on the journal, and I honestly don't take enough pictures of interesting things like this, plus who knows when I will see something like this again on my travels, di di di di..." by which stage I'm already out of sight of the thing worth photographing. Meh, it's just a bridge, a really impressive bridge... damn I should have taken a pic.. Once on the other side I followed the coastal road east along the errr.. the coast. It was nice. Sheeps to the left of me. Ocean to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with Ural.
They have nice coastlines in Scotchland. The pebbly beaches are rubbish but the bay is scattered with islands, some of which have castles on them. Not sandcastles, proper ones with kings and stableboys and all that jazz. Medieval jazz.
I want to do something I've rarely done before on my ride, and that's to find a place to camp while there's still light enough to tent up and relax. I headed inland towards some camp place somewhere. My GPS shows points of interest such as fuel stations and campsites and even local tourist attractions. Where to find men in tartan skirts blowing into a sheep tummy spiked with flutes, stuff like that. This particular campsite luckily allowed tents, quite a lot in the UK catered solely to tossers in campy van caravan mobile home things. We're old and cashed up, lets drive around the country towing a big room full of cushions and a poo bucket.
I was the only tenter there and the tenty space was a small grassy patch in the middle of the circle of caravans. I felt like a wild west pioneer circling the wagons to defend against an Indian attack. Actually, it was more like what the term 'circle the wagons' means these days, where you take three or four bunks in a prison cell and arrange them in a circle with sheets blocking what's going on inside. Whats happening inside is that two dozen inmates are raping the hell outta their bitch. Pretty eerie, trying to set up tent while everyone in their rolling tin can peered out through their beige curtains at the strange brown man with the camo cycle...
I spent about an hour in the camp showers, trying to wash my clothes with body wash, but the water was too hard and it didn't lather up properly, my laundry just ended up wet and smelling a little of my socks. Here's a tip: Don't use dirty socks as clothes scrubbing mittens. I decided to rig a clothes line between my bike and a bush tree, try and air dry my clothes as best as I could before night fell. Here's a tip: Don't try air dry clothes in Scotland, their air isn't dry, and there's something bent about their sun, it don't quite reach the earth... Once night hit I decided to use the campsite dryer to dry my damp clothes.
Yeah, here's a tip: Don't waste yer time with campsite dryers, they turn yer damp clothes into warm damp clothes. I spent the night listening to bagpipe music on my lil radio and sipping on port. Bagpipe music sounds much more better in Scotland! Bedtime bedtime, in the morning I head to gosh-knows-where. Norf.
