Assault on the summit

I hauled myself out of bed a little late, having entirely forgotten which very limited hours breakfast would be available, and hoping that no one would be occupying the single shower that was shared between four rooms. I believe I had the facilities all to myself for much of the weekend, but also didn't particularly want to appear at breakfast with my hair still suffering the ravages of yesterday's weather (my hair doesn't exactly frizz with humidity - it looks more like I ran glue through it and forgot to comb it out before it dried - apparently this is the price to pay for the dyed-out-of-a-bottle black I prefer). The Merith is one of those rambling old buildings with a creak in the floor and just enough mildew in the shower grout to make you wonder exactly what year the establishment was last refurbished. But it also has just about the friendliest owners and staff imaginable, which entirely makes up for the fact that the in-room heater has only two settings (burn + freeze). And just across the street was a nondescript park with a somewhat shaggy trim of grass which was nonetheless a top contender for the birthplace of golf - although this was hotly contested by a couple of other equally scruffy parks around the same part of town.

At breakfast an extremely cheery woman (who I took to be the wife of the gentleman who charged my card 700 pounds yesterday) brought out toast and tea while I helped myself to cereal and juice. Then, to my surprise, she came over again and asked what I would like to eat - toast and tea apparently being just the precursor to a full Scottish breakfast. Without thinking, I ordered eggs - scrambled - and hash browns.

Now, reaching way back into the depths of my memory of my first visit to the northern end of the British isle, I could just glimpse a promise I had made to myself that I would never, ever eat scrambled eggs in Scotland again. This oath was the result of a week-long stay at a rambling old mansion in a rural part of the country from where, as I mentioned below, my mother and self toured around the local castles while my father was hard at work. The hotel had been quietly nick-named Fawlty Towers after the British comedy of the same name, largely because every evening the John Cleese look-alike owner would get sloshed while one hotel guest or another clamped his hand firmly on the owner's wife's bottom. The place was set on a golf course, where in the wee hours of the morning one could hear the mingled shouts of "fore!" interspersed among gunshots from pheasant hunters prowling the perimeter for prey. The only note-worthy flaw about the place was the morning breakfast, which inevitably consisted of a few pieces of toast accompanied by an enormous plate of scrambled eggs so large and so soggy that it must have taken several hens and a pint of water to produce eat helping. On top of that was a taste of some spice that gave off the vague odor of a pig stall - which, many years later, I finally identified as white pepper. To this day, the taste of white pepper makes any dish virtually inedible.

But I had forgotten about my prior experience of scrambled eggs in Scotland when I ordered the same breakfast on my first morning in Edinburgh. The white pepper was missing, but the remainder of the recipe was strictly intact, and I found before myself a pale four-egg plate, slightly too soggy for any amount of salt to soak up. I ate as much as I could stomach, and hid the remainder under a napkin that also held an open packet of something called "brown sauce," which I had read and mistaken for "brown sugar," which I was attempting to pour into my tea until I realized that it was more or less a thick sort of teriyaki sauce. I escaped back up the stairs before the friendly owners could notice how much I'd left on the plate, grabbed enough gear to last me through the day - rain or shine - and headed to town.

I meandered out with the vague intent of arriving at Edinburgh Castle sometime before mid-day, but without much more plan than that. I knew the vague direction I was heading (or thought I did), so instead of taking the long route back through Waverly Station, I cut up across a park that turned out to be Calton Hill, full of various unrelated monuments and markers. I came down off the hilltop and got a glimpse of my intended destination - the castle - which was well farther than I thought, and on an entirely different hill. I scanned the horizon for a short-cut, but it looked like after gaining all that altitude, the only option was to descend back toward the valley floor and go up the next hill where - one would hope - I would actually reach the castle.

I made my way back toward the train station where this adventure started yesterday, then cut upward onto the stretch of road somewhat ironically known as the "royal mile." Apparently it got that name because it stretches from Hollyrood Palace to the castle on the hill, but by all accounts, the street itself was the center of all squalor in Victorian Edinburgh, where the sewage was largely disposed of by shouting the warning "gardeloo!" (a corruption of the French "garde l'eau") which roughly means "watch out, for I will soon throw a bucket of fecal matter from the fourth floor onto the open street below." Far from squalid, today it is a collection of cute cafes and the same general variety of boutique shops that afflict most gentrified sectors of old cities. But, being Scotland, it has a variety of kitschy outlets selling all shades and varieties of woolen plaid products. Tucked among these were a few store-fronts selling the odd combination of Celtic-inspired jewelry and plastic statues of Buddha - which wouldn't have surprised me in, say, San Francisco, but seemed very odd in the context of a place where swirly Celtic symbols are actually a local cultural artifact. One of these places had in the window perhaps the oddest slogan ever invented, which I repeat word-for-word because I couldn't make it any more perplexing if I tried: next to a giant fake trilobite etched in sandstone (I know it was fake because there was an identical one in the next store-front window) was a sign that read, "This fossilized sea creature promotes leadership and management skills."

Huh.

Interesting.

After staring at that for some time - wondering if perhaps it would make sense if I thought about it long enough - I continued up the royal mile to the castle, which was firmly guarded by a line at least 200 people deep to get to the ticket office. Being so firmly repelled by the idea of waiting so long for entrance into an edifice which was already going to contain the several dozen people ahead of me in line, I retraced my steps back down the royal mile, only stopping once into an establishment that boasted a replica of a wool mill. It did indeed have several mock-ups of various pieces of an old factory, but I was most taken by a knee-length black cape with red trim - for a mere 150 pounds, I could see myself dashing through the streets of London trailing behind me this gorgeous coat. Then I could see myself coming across the un-worn garment in my closet a year down the line wishing I really had that money for rent instead. I didn't buy it. But some day, many years down the road when my school debt is under six figures again, I will own that cashmere cape and go dashing about London. Some day. Or maybe not.

I kept on my way down the road and eventually bottomed out near Hollyrood Palace, which itself was closed but which had an attached cafe that boasted the dual advantages of a heated indoor patio and an admirable variety of desert dishes. I ordered a sandwich (brie and cranberry - how come no one in America ever thinks of that brilliant combination?!), a Greek salad, and a beer. I generally don't drink beer before 6 pm (heh, that's a nice way of saying I don't drink beer at all), but I've found that any wine that costs under about $10 a glass in Britain contains sulfites, which area quick trip to a bad headache. And I needed some hearty fortification to complete the next step of my journey in any case.

Nearby the palace cafe was the city park that housed an old volcanic plug called Arthur's Seat. Towering above the rest of the Edinburgh skyline, the peak is a target of the more stalwart sorts of day visitors, which I of course considered myself to be. After resting my still-sore feet over a long lunch, I set out for mountain.

From the base of the slope, I could see a gradual incline that graded gently but steadily upwards. I also stumbled across a much steeper trail that bore straight up the back of the hill, much more precipitously (and directly) toward the goal. I chose the latter and started the forced march upwards. I crested what looked to be the highest part of the hill, egged on by a man and his ten or so year-old son who hardly looked back when they breezed by me. At the crest, thinking I was virtually there, I found to my dismay that in fact I was on a side butte beside the main peak. All that altitude gain, and what lay before me was a modest drop to the valley floor on one side, and a saddle route across to the path that switched-backed up the real hill. The saddle dropped to just a couple hundred feet above sea level, virtually down to where I started. Just warming up. I hiked over to the main slope, into which was cut a vertical stone-lined drainage route and next to it a zig-zag flag-stone path leading to the peak. I sighed and started up, readying for my final assault on the summit.

About a half dozen turns up the switchbacks, I paused to take a breath and wiggle my feet around - I was wearing my Sensible Walking Shoes, but they were not hiking boots by any stretch of the imagination (I usually wear them only over the challenging terrain of linoleum hospital floors). I turned to take in the view of the city, when I noticed something out toward the horizon that was just about the last thing I wanted to see about that moment. The gray curtain of a squall line was cutting its way across the Firth of Forth (a name that up til this visit I had assumed was an invention of some Monty Python skit). A stiff breeze was backing around the compass, and I couldn't get any sense for which direction the storm was headed. I hesitated, then headed up another switchback. Stopped again, and unless my mind was tricking me, the forward edge of the downpour was slightly closer now than it was two minutes earlier. I made one more upward switchback before I decided that no matter where the storm was headed, I did not want to be several hundred feet up a near-vertical rock if it passed overhead. I had promised myself a large piece of the chocolate gateaux that was on offer back at the palace cafe if I made the summit, but at this point I decided that my only goal for the afternoon was to rocket back down the hillside and be back inside the cafe eating cake by the time the squall passed overhead.

I was off the hillside and skirting along the grass path around the base of the hill when the first winds picked up, followed by gust-blown splotches of rain, drops the size that a seagull might leave on a parked car. I scrambled to find the umbrella I had tucked into my pack that morning. I opened it, and a gust of wind caught the fabric like a sail, immediately and irrevocably kinking several of the weak aluminum spikes. I folded it back down to a lumpy package, put my head down, and charged into the wind as best I could. I was long out of sight of the peak by now and do not know if the edge of the cloud just missed it or rammed it straight on, but from my position, I was satisfied either way that I'd dodged a somewhat wet, wind-blown, and unpleasant fate.

I did indeed go back for that chocolate gateaux, though as is inevitable, it was far sweeter in anticipation than in the final reality. Or perhaps the reverse, as it was more sugar than chocolate. But I happily packed in the couple hundred extra calories and rested my ever-more aching feet. I still had a mile or so to go back to the hotel.

By this time it was getting to be late afternoon, but the skies had cleared in the wake of the squall and it was pleasantly sunny out again. I set out back toward Leith, getting turned around and just lost enough that I found myself off the map and unsure of how to get myself back onto it besides wandering around til I found a street sign that matched a name on the paper. I got as far as the hotel and realized that if I went in now, I would probably find myself sitting there for hours waiting for the sun to go down with little else to do. There are not many eateries in that part of town, and nothing in the way of coffee shops to while away an evening in. This is a fairly working-class area of the city, just enough such that none of the bars looked at all inviting to a single foreign woman traveling alone. So I kept walking toward the docks at the far north end of town. The area has gentrified in the last decade or so, enough that the hotel owners had assured me there were many shops and restaurants up there, as well as a shopping mall. I figured any shopping mall must at least have a coffee shop open on a Saturday evening if nothing else, so I headed in that direction. Ten minutes past the hotel, now almost limping from new hot spots on both feet, the sunlight took on that eerie glow of thunder coming: bright and warm against a background of grey that sucks the sun right out of the sky. Again I was caught out in an open shower; I reached for the umbrella, figuring I couldn't do any more damage to it now. As soon as I opened it, the remaining spokes collapsed under the stress of the wind; I tucked it under an arm, headed straight for the open door of the mall. Once I got inside I popped open the umbrella once more just to see if there was any salvaging it. There was not, and I threw it in the first trash bin I came to. Normally I hate throwing useful things away, but at this stage there was no making anything useful out of the flapping remains of nylon and twisted aluminum, so I sighed and chucked it.

I looked around for the cheapest place to grab a snack in the mall, which turned out - no doubt - to be Starbucks. Second night in a row. But their sandwiches are good! And cheap! And just enough calories to get me through a half-hour of ads and two hours of one of the most inane films currently making the first-line cinema rounds: The Da Vinci Code. So much potential, such mediocre execution. This I already knew, since I'd read the book once when someone was passing it around a dredge and - having exhausted all my own reading material - read through it in about half an afternoon. But with Tom Hanks in the lead exhibiting his inevitable Oscar-winning small-mammal-in-the-headlights schtick and some cheap special effects that made the whole thing out like a bad episode of CSI, the movie was even worse than the book. However, sitting through it did accomplish my main goal, which was that after two hours with my bare feet on the cool theater floor, the swelling went down enough that I actually could walk home under my own power. The sun was just going down after ten o'clock, and I carefully mapped out and memorized a route along large well-lit streets before I left the mall, only to find myself turned around and cutting through a very well-lit alley followed by an unreasonably dark park. I skirted back around toward my intended destination and somehow arrived back at the hotel with no worse wear to show for it...except in my feet, which had collective burst out with three new blisters, including one that had neatly healed over since I left Lisbon, sealing itself nicely shut so that a new one could form right underneath the old one. I gladly climbed into bed - this time at least after dark! - and rested up for another day tomorrow.