When 2011 began, I was approaching
complete retirement. As was my nature, I
felt the need to have a plan on how I would manage our finances during that
time. My goal was to support Diane and I
in the manner to which we had become accustomed. This year I would turn 70 and a half. That meant I had to start taking the Required
Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from my individual and business IRAs. I could simply use the defaults provided by
Vanguard, but, considering my mathematical and financial background, I wanted
to plan the best way to do it myself.
Since I was a member of the American Association of Individual Investors,
I could use their website to investigate various strategies. After deciding on one, I could set up
automatic withdrawals from my IRAs that would meet the requirement.
I was delighted that my paper, “Guidelines
for Accurate EC50/IC50 Estimation,” would be published in the journal
Pharmaceutical Statistics. Since it had
been posted for sale on the journal’s website, I had been receiving emails from
around the world asking me to send them copies.
This reaffirmed my belief that scientists and statisticians wanted a way
to know whether their EC50 or IC50 estimated values were accurate. I was asked to attend a conference in Korea to
present the paper, but even if my expenses were paid (which they didn’t offer),
I wasn’t really interested in going.
Diane and I were happy with our plans for the
coming year. We would go on two Road
Scholar trips, one international and one domestic. At
home, we would attend Tai Chi and Osher classes. I was now the co-treasurer of Muleskinners (a
Democratic luncheon club) which meant attending the Friday meetings and filing
quarterly ethics reports. Diane and I
volunteered to serve as judges in the April municipal election. We would see a lot of movies and plays and
attend Odyssey Chamber Music concerts in the winter and the Missouri Symphony
in the summer.
We were living a comfortable life except
for one thing: Diane’s drinking. She denied she was drinking alone in the
kitchen at night. After I completed my
task of clearing the dinner table, I would go to our bedroom and wait for her
to join me. Her task was to load the
dishwasher and hand wash any large items.
The final straw occurred one night when I waited and waited for her to join
me. I finally returned to the kitchen
and found her sitting on the floor. She
couldn’t get up and was obviously inebriated.
Even with my help, it took a long time before she was able to stand up
and walk.
I decided it was time to remove wine from
our house. We would no longer have our
(supposed) limit of one glass with dinner.
I disposed of every bit of alcohol in the house except cooking sherry. Then I discovered that, with nothing else
available, Diane was even drinking the sherry.
Now it also had to go. Neither
one of us would be drinking anything alcoholic at home. It was impossible to obtain her agreement to
not drink alcohol away from home, but it wasn’t difficult to limit the
consumption. I didn’t want to create a
scene at restaurants or events when Diane ordered wine. Later, I could wave my hand over her glass before
the waiters refilled it.
Diane was also making too many mistakes on
the invoices for my few clients. I had
to check each invoice very carefully before sending them out. This was another good reason for ending
Sebaugh’s Information Services. I was also
hurt that Diane would lie to me. In our
20 years together, I had never felt that Diane lied to me about anything. Why now and about drinking? Why had she been drinking to excess? She wouldn’t or couldn’t explain it, but I still
wondered.
It was no surprise to us when Diane’s
family members decided to leave Columbia and move to Pennsylvania. Her sister, Sue, wanted to be near her
grandchildren. Her son, Joe, lived there
and now had two children. Sue’s husband,
Joe, had been a Marine in Vietnam. Using
his veterans’ benefits, he purchased a split-level house near her son in which
Sue and Joe could live in the lower-level apartment while their daughter’s
family could live upstairs.
February was the last month in their Columbia
condo. I hired Ron, a friend who was a
buyer’s broker, to manage selling the property, while Diane took charge of
cleaning up the place. There were
several other properties in the area with For Sale signs, but I kept my price
higher. I had paid cash for the property
when I bought it. I would require the
buyer to sign a promissory note and security agreement. I had a five-year schedule of monthly
payments that the buyer would make to me at which time the unpaid balance would
come due. Once I approved the buyer, no
other contingency for financing would be required.
In March, once again my sister Earlene came
to Columbia for the True/False film festival.
It was a somewhat subdued visit since it was her first without her
husband, Vince. We asked Craig to join
us and squire Earlene around so she would have a male escort. He agreed to do so even though it meant he
would need to sleep uncomfortably on a futon in Diane’s office since Earlene already
had the guest bedroom.
My friend Ellen asked for some help. Her mother had died the previous December,
and Ellen was laid off from her job of 21 years in February, a double
whammy. Ellen is the woman who in the
late 1970s had asked me to teach her and her friends about mutual funds, and we
had remained friends. She asked if I
could help her in dealing with her inheritance.
I was glad to again share my financial expertise with her, and she was
good with numbers. We set up two card
tables in my office. Ellen had her
computer on one, and I had a second computer on the other. There was a lot of her mother’s paperwork and
documents to weed through. Her mother
had a number of annuities that had to be carefully studied. Then there was the task of carefully going
through all her mother’s papers since Ellen had discovered U.S. savings bonds tucked
away among them. She had to transfer her
mother’s accounts to her name, all-in-all a task that would keep Ellen busy for
months.
I really enjoyed working with Ellen. We both started Vanguard accounts in the
early 1990s, after learning that most of its mutual funds were no-load with low
management fees. I began using software
to manage my finances in the 1980s, initially with Andrew Tobias’s Managing-Your-Money
and switching to Quicken in 2000. All of
my financial data, personal and business banking and investment accounts, could
now be processed in one place, which made it easier to see the big picture. Therefore, one of the first things I worked on
with Ellen was helping her set up all her holdings in Quicken.
A statistician like myself knows that all
decision-making needs to begin with accurate and complete data. Quicken software helped accomplish that task. I felt that people often complicated their
holdings by having separate accounts for each perceived purpose, like travel, a
new car, household spending and so forth.
In Quicken, transactions could be identified using these same categories
while using a single account. Ellen
listened to my recommendations, and although she did not always act on them
immediately, I felt she gave them thorough consideration. Most of them she ultimately followed.
I had the same experience when I started
working with our mutual friend Mary on using Quicken. She was now retired and receiving a pension
from the state of Missouri. She was a
much different investor than Ellen or I.
She was very risk averse about holding any stock shares or mutual
funds. She only held funds in her bank’s
checking and savings accounts and CDs at the financial institution that offered
the best interest rate. She mainly used
Quicken to reconcile her checking account when she received a statement. She held no debt, not even on her car, truck,
or house. She paid her credit card off
each month. I calculated the 2010 income
taxes using H&R Block’s Tax Cut software for both Ellen and Mary, as well
as myself and Diane.
The condo in the Country Club Estates sold
quickly in April. Ron found the perfect
buyer for the terms I was offering. The
buyer had earlier declared medical bankruptcy and would not have been able to
get a conventional mortgage. We met at
the house they were renting, all sitting around their dining room table, and
Diane almost wrecked the deal. As the
buyer and I were agreeing on terms, Diane spoke up and said we shouldn’t make a
deal with someone who had previously declared bankruptcy and was therefore a
bad risk. I felt his situation was one
in which he sincerely was looking for a way to dig himself out of a hole. Also, his wife’s mother owned a title
insurance company. I asked Diane to
leave the room, and the buyer and I signed an agreement that I felt protected
me. I would not involve her in my
business again. This was another
instance of wondering what was going on with Diane. Her outburst had taken me by surprise.
We were looking forward to our first trip
of the year. I was not doing any more
volunteer work with the School District, but my friend Bob and I were still in
close communication. He had about
400,000 frequent flyer miles with American Airlines (AA) that he had
accumulated from business travel. He and
his family members had no intention of using the miles, and, before they
expired, he told me how to use the miles on his AA account.
We used his miles for the first time on a
Road Scholar trip, “Quintessential Britain,” which
started in London and ended in Edinburgh.
We had not traveled with the Road Scholar organization before. It began under the name Elderhostel, a
travel-learning program that usually lodged its participants in college
dormitories. After 35 years, it briefly updated
its name to Exploritas, before ending up with the name Road Scholar which some
people confused with the Rhodes Scholarship program. The Great Britain tour looked excellent, and
we would not be staying in college dormitories.
To increase my knowledge of early English
history, I read the historical mystery novels by C. J. Sansom. They are set in the reign of Henry VIII in the
16th century and feature the hunchbacked lawyer, Matthew Shardlake. It gave me a good introduction to London
history which Diane and I could build on during our four nights in London prior
to the start of the tour.
After our morning arrival at Heathrow, we
took a train to Paddington Station and then a ride in one of the famous black
taxis to our motel in Southwark. At the
nearby Globe Theatre, we had lunch reservations at The Swan and balcony tickets
for the afternoon performance of Shakespeare’s play All's Well that Ends Well.
After the all-night flight and a good
lunch, the straight-backed wooden seats almost guaranteed that I wouldn’t fall
asleep during the performance.
Inside the Globe Theatre
Musicians in the balcony above the back of
the stage
Another reason for our selection of lodging
was the ease of walking to the Bankside Pier to board a boat for the seaward
trip on the Thames to Greenwich. Diane
had read all of the novels written by Patrick O’Brian about the Royal Navy
during the Napoleonic Wars, and Greenwich contained much history on the
topic. As we disembarked our boat, we
could see that the Cutty Sark, a 19th-century sailing ship, was undergoing
renovation, so we wouldn’t be able to board it.
The Royal Observatory was our first priority. To get there, we walked up the hill through
the Old Royal Observatory Garden. Diane
told me that we would see the scientific instruments the British invented for accurately
sailing their ships to the desired destination.
The purpose of the Royal Observatory was a
very practical one: to reduce shipwrecks. When out of sight of land, mariners had no
accurate way of knowing their position. They
could find their latitude (north-south position) by observing the sun or stars,
but not their longitude (east-west position).
Even if they had accurate maps, their position on the map was
uncertain. Exhibits at the Royal
Observatory showed a series of chronometers, devices for keeping time on the
seas. To determine "longitude by chronometer,"
the ship’s navigator needed a chronometer set at the local time at the Prime
Meridian, or zero degrees longitude, which Diane stood on near the
Observatory. Nowadays with our
satellites and GPS devices, we don’t think about this interesting history.
Diane standing on the Prime Meridian
Diane and I walked back down the hill to
have a cup of hot soup and bread at a local restaurant. Then we made a visit to the National Maritime
Museum whose purpose is to tell the story of Great Britain’s maritime history. The collections included not only ships,
navigational instruments, maps and globes, but also paintings. There was so much to see in Greenwich. The Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College took my breath away. We boarded the boat for the trip back to
London and listened as they announced the sights along the way. To do some sight-seeing, we stayed on the
boat past our destination and then returned while comfortably sitting on the
boat.
Display of whaling ships at the National
Maritime Museum
Painted room at the Old Royal Naval College
Our lodging for the next two nights was at
the Marriott Grosvenor House where we had stayed during our previous London
visit. Diane told our motel to have a
taxi ready to pick us up at 6:30 the next morning. However, we walked out and found that it was
a “gypsy” taxi, not a black taxi. The
driver quoted an exorbitant price for the trip.
Fortunately, we knew what it should cost and told him we wouldn’t go
with him at his price. Finding he had
knowledgeable passengers, he immediately back-pedaled and cut the price to get
us into his vehicle.
After dropping off our luggage, we joined a
King Arthur's Realm tour to Stonehenge, Avebury, and Glastonbury. Before taking this trip, I had read books
about King Arthur and Mary Queen of Scots, so it was fun to see the locations
mentioned in the books. Stonehenge is a familiar
sight, but most people don’t know about the Avebury complex, one of the
principal ceremonial sites of Neolithic Britain. It is one of the largest, and undoubtedly the
most complex, of Britain's surviving Neolithic henge monuments (prehistoric
circular or oval earthen enclosure).
What made it different from Stonehenge is that I could walk right up and
touch the large stones. Glastonbury is
where King Arthur’s sword was reputedly created. We were told that the Glastonbury Abbey was
the burial place of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere.
Me and Diane at Stonehenge on a slow day
Avebury
Glastonbury Abbey
The next morning, we walked to Paddington Station
and took the train to Oxford. We had
arranged to meet my sister Earlene at the nearby bus station where we all
boarded a bus for Blenheim. It is the
seat of the Dukes of Marlborough and the birthplace of Winston Churchill and we
planned to tour the Palace and Gardens.
The tour was not what I expected.
Some of the rooms were presented in a theatrical fashion and the exhibits
were so extensive and poorly presented that I rapidly became bored. However, the grounds and gardens were well
maintained and beautiful. I much prefer America’s
National Churchill Museum in Fulton, Missouri.
Me and Earlene in front of the Blenheim
Castle maze garden
We took the bus back to Oxford to join the
family Earlene was visiting. I found the
husband interesting as he did statistical analysis using medical and hospital
data. He had a lot of this data to work
with because of England’s nationalized medical system. We had a lovely dinner in the Jericho area
before Diane and I took the train back to London.
Early the next morning we took a taxi to
our Road Scholar hotel to drop off our luggage.
The actual tour didn’t start until late afternoon, so we took a subway into
old London. We had read about the Old
Bailey, the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, and wanted to know
more about it. That was a very informative
visit. We were required to leave our
backpacks at security before we could go upstairs. Once there we could open a door and sit on benches
which were in a balcony overlooking a trial taking place. Just like in the movies, the wigged lawyers
were questioning young men in front of a wigged judge. Most of the evidence presented was video from
the surveillance cameras that are ubiquitous in London, on the streets, in
buses, subways, in fact, just everywhere.
After watching this trial, I started counting cameras as I walked along
the London streets, WOW!
We next went to the Museum of London since
we had found in Barcelona and Rome that the city museums are a good place to learn
its history. We avoided the minutia and
concentrated on the big picture story of London. After lunch at the museum, we took the subway
back to the Road Scholar hotel.
That evening we met with our group for a
welcome drink and dinner followed by a meeting during which each attendee introduced
themselves and the Course Director introduced our program. When Diane and I introduced ourselves, we
made clear that we were partners. Later,
we were approached by several other attendees who told us about one of their
children, relatives or friends who were gay.
The majority of our acquaintances in Columbia were heterosexual, and we
didn’t have any problem fitting in with the group.
We spent the next morning at the
British Museum with a guided tour of some highlights. Since we had been to Egypt, we were
particularly interested in the Rosetta Stone, so-called because it was found in
Rosetta, Egypt. It is essentially a
stone inscribed with the same text in the three scripts being used in Egypt at
the time: Demotic, hieroglyphic and Greek.
That made it key to the understanding and deciphering of ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphs. Next, we were shown the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles. These are a collection of beautiful classical
Greek marble sculptures that were a part of the Temple of Parthenon on the
Acropolis of Athens; Greece still claims them and wants them back. We were shown many other lovely artifacts,
but these two stand out in my mind.
The Rosetta Stone (with reflections in
the display glass)
A portion of the Elgin or Parthenon
Marbles
In the afternoon we first visited St
John’s Priory Church, with its twelfth century Crypt. It started as a monastery before becoming a
church. The Priory Gallery features an
exhibition on life in the medieval priory (monastery) and the surrounding area
through the ages. The Church Cloister Garden has a range of herbs which provide
an idea of the medicinal gardens that would have been cultivated by the Knights
Hospitaller during Medieval times. We stopped
by the Guildhall on our way to St. Paul's Cathedral, a Church of England
cathedral dedicated to Paul the Apostle. It is visible everywhere in London as
it sits at the top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the city. We drove by Buckingham Palace on our way back
to the hotel.
Everybody is headed to St. Paul’s
Cathedral
The City of Bath was the destination
of our tour bus the next day, but Diane and I were surprised that we stopped at
Stonehenge on the way. When we signed up
for this tour, that stop wasn’t included.
On this visit, it was much more crowded, but we were given audiotapes to
listen to as we walked along the boardwalk.
Then we continued to Bath to visit the famous Roman baths and pump room. We were discovering that our large tour group
(about 30) included many who had been teachers.
They were well read and intelligent, as was our tour leader.
Stonehenge (sign indicates the
audiotape number)
A large Roman Bath
The next day we were back in London,
joining all the tourists to walk through the Tower of London where we saw the
Crown Jewels, the Towers which held prisoners and the instruments used for
torture. Our group went on a boat tour
of London on the Thames and we all stood in the long lines to take a ride
inside the little cabins on the London eye.
Since this was our last night in London, our bus took us on a tour of
London by night and a pub visit.
View of the London Eye from our boat tour
View of London Eye cabin
The next morning, we rode on the bus
heading for the Cotswolds region, stopping at Oxford. At Oxford, Road Scholar had arranged for a
local tour guide to take us on a walking tour of the city. While visiting the Oxford college of Christ
Church, we toured the gallery to view the Old Master paintings and drawings, as
well as the dining room that was used in the Harry Potter movies. We walked to the Church Meadow where JRR
Tolkien and his friend CS Lewis used to go for walks.
The Radcliffe Camera (part of Bodleian
Library complex in Oxford)
We then continued to our lodging for the
night and dinner in the attached restaurant.
I loved the British puddings served for dessert. It was difficult to stay awake after dinner for
the scheduled lecture on the history of the Cotswolds. I just remember hearing about the honey-hued
color of the houses that came from the type of limestone quarried in the
region.
We began the next day by visiting the village
of Broadway and then going to the 55-foot-high Broadway Tower, a folly located
on the second highest hill in the Cotswolds.
A folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but
suggestive of some other purpose. This
one had three round corner turrets built to resemble a mock castle. Two of them had spiral staircases. We walked up one of them to view exhibits in
the middle portion and then walked down the other staircase. I was reminded of our experience climbing the
narrow stairs to the top of The Belfry in Bruges with people both going up and
down the same stairs. I appreciated the two
separate staircases.
The Broadway Tower
We had lunch in the town of Stow-on-the-Wold
prepared by local women. The English seemed
to eat a lot of small sandwich halves on white bread with crusts removed and sparse
fillings. We walked around the Stow
market square then drove to another market town, Chipping Campden, notable for
its terraced High Street.
After breakfast the next day, we had a
lecture on "Stratford and Shakespeare" to prepare us for our
afternoon to Stratford-upon Avon. Our
local guide showed us around the area. I thought the locks on the river Avon
were interesting because of their small size and their manual operation by the
boaters themselves. We saw the white
swans on the river and viewed the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and adjacent Swan
Theatre on the banks of the river, but didn’t tour them.
Swans
Lock with small boat going through
We had a bit of a hike in the afternoon to
see the Hidcote Gardens. There are many
public footpaths in Britain and we started out on one, learning how to walk
through the gates. Then although it seemed to be a path, we ended up walking
through a pasture in which we really had to look out for the animal droppings. We made it to the garden which is one of the
best-known and most influential Arts and Crafts gardens in Britain. Arts and Crafts gardens incorporate the use
of natural, often local materials and traditional craftsmanship, respecting
regional traditions. Happily, we didn’t
have to walk back through the pasture, but were picked up by our bus.
Hidcote Gardens
We left in the morning for our next stay in
Chester. Along the way we stopped at Ironbridge, named after its bridge. Built between 1777-1779, it was the first arch
bridge in the world to be made out of cast iron, a material which was
previously far too expensive to use for large structures. However, a new blast
furnace nearby lowered the cost and so encouraged local engineers and
architects to solve a long-standing problem of a crossing over the Severn
River.
Ironbridge
We then drove to the nearby Blists Hill
living museum. Built on a former
industrial complex, it attempts to recreate the sights, sounds and smells of a
Victorian town in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It reminded me of Silver Dollar City near
Branson, MO. After lunch we continued to
Chester for a lecture entitled "Introduction to Snowdonia," and
learned it is both a mountainous region in northwestern Wales and the name of a
national park.
For our morning outing, the bus took us to the
Snowdonia National Park where we had an opportunity to explore the large Conwy
Castle on the north coast of Wales. It
was built on a rock promontory to prevent undermining and guard the entrance to
the River Conwy from the Irish Sea. Before
lunch we had a lecture entitled "National Parks." The other nearby Welsh castle we visited was
the Dolbadarn Castle. It consists of a
courtyard, surrounded by a number of towers and a round keep. Much of the construction was done with slate,
which explains our next visit to the National Slate Museum. There we saw presentations of harvesting and
cutting slate.
Conwy Castle
Slate Museum
The group left Wales and proceeded to
Chester where we spent the night. The
next morning, we went on a walking tour around Chester. It was founded as a Roman fortress in the 1st
century A.D. Some of the walls still
exist, and I was able to walk up some stairs and along a section. Those Romans had great engineers who built to
last. In the old city, we saw another
unique feature: Chester’s Rows. The Rows
create a double-deck street, with steps leading up from ground level to long
covered balconies that cut through an eye-catching network of buildings shaped
by every architectural style of the past 800 years. The Chester Cathedral was magnificent. It was built on the site of earlier places of
worship by the Romans. The oldest parts
of the existing cathedral were built by the Benedictine monks around 1093. Our try-to-stay-awake lecture after lunch was
entitled "Chester and Cheshire."
To explain the lecture title, Chester is a walled cathedral city in
Cheshire, England.
Chester’s Walls
Chester Cathedral
The Bronte sisters called out to us the
next morning, but to get in the mood for a visit, we first needed to walk
through the heather on the moors around the town of Haworth where they grew
up. Then we toured their former home in
the Brontë Parsonage Museum. We walked
through all the rooms of the home, and pictured the sisters writing their
novels sitting in the dining room. We
paid a visit to Emily’s grave in the St Michael and All Angels' Church
graveyard. Then we headed on toward York
and heard a lecture entitled "Abbeys & Monasteries," which prepared
us for our visit to an Abbey the next day.
Heather on the moor
Rievaulx Abbey was founded in 1132 and
eventually became one of the greatest and wealthiest in England. This made it a target for Henry VIII who
dissolved it in 1538. Its ruins are now a tourist attraction. After lunch we
visited Castle Howard, which is not a real castle, but one of the grandest
private residences in Britain and familiar to television and movie audiences as
the fictional "Brideshead.” We
toured the inside of the castle and the gardens outside.
Castle Howard gardens
The walled city of York, where we toured
the next day, was interesting because it was founded by the Romans, was briefly
conquered by the Vikings, and then conquered by the Kingdom of England. The York Minster is a Gothic cathedral and is
one of the largest of its kind in Northern Europe. It has one of the most sizable collections of
medieval stained glass in the world and contains a famous rose window,
reminiscent of the ones in Notre Dame.
We arrived at Evensong early enough to view the interior and then enjoy the
lovely sounds of the choirs and organ during the service.
Rose window in York Cathedral
On our way to Edinburgh, our group received
a grand tour of Chesters Fort on Hadrian's Wall. Built to guard the northern frontier of the
Roman Empire in AD122, it stretched almost 80 miles from the North Sea to the
Irish Sea. It was an occupied military
zone of castles, barracks, ramparts, forts and settlements meant to protect
England from the Scottish tribes. Then
we crossed the border into Scotland, and checked into our hotel.
Me at Hadrian’s Wall
After lunch we toured Carlton Hill across
the street from our hotel. It was a
great way to introduce the group to the city.
Not only did we have panoramic views of Edinburgh, but also the Firth of
Forth, the large estuary of the River Forth that flows into the North Sea. We visited several monuments on the hill. There were twelve tall columns, reminiscent
of the Parthenon in Athens, which were never completed but intended to
commemorate the Scottish servicemen who died in the Napoleonic Wars. The Nelson Monument was shaped like an
up-turned telescope and built to commemorate Admiral Lord Nelson’s death at the
Battle of Trafalgar. Diane and I thought
about what we had learned in Greenwich concerning the importance of chronographs
when we were told that a time ball which dropped at one o’clock was added to
the top of the monument to enable ships moored in the Firth of Forth to set
their timepieces accurately. Dropping at
1:00 p.m. instead of noon began in Greenwich in 1833, because its astronomers were
too busy with observations at noon. Another
building on the hills was shaped like a Greek temple and had served as the City
Observatory. I found it an interesting
collection of structures. We then
returned to our hotel for our final lecture entitled "Border Wars."
The Nelson Monument
We spent the next day exploring more of the
city itself. Our walking tour first took
us by historic Holyroodhouse Palace, the Queen's official residence in the
Scottish capital, and then up the street by the very modern Scottish Parliament
building, before proceeding to the business district. Diane and I briefly went on the grounds of
the Edinburgh Castle but did not tour it.
We had lunch at Deacon Brodie’s Tavern, sitting at the front window on
the second floor watching the tourists walking along Canongate, or what is
known as the Royal Mile between the Holyroodhouse
Palace and Edinburgh Castle. We next visited
the National Museum of Scotland. One
notable item on display was Dolly the sheep (stuffed, of course) which in July
1996 was the first mammal cloned from an adult stem cell.
Scottish Parliament Building
Dolly
In the morning our bus traveled over the
Firth of Forth to take us on our next expedition. The old Forth Bridge was completed in 1890,
is considered a symbol of Scotland (having been voted Scotland's greatest
man-made wonder in 2016), and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Because of heavy
traffic on this bridge and need for repairs, construction was starting on a new
bridge. We headed to the county of
Perthshire and the Huntingtower Castle with its two towers and long history of
intrigue involving kidnapping and murder. Our group briefly visited “The Mains of
Huntingtower” which is a monument composed of the remains of a neolithic henge,
five prehistoric roundhouses, and groups of pits which may represent a Roman
road.
View of the Firth of Forth and the old
bridge
Huntingtower Castle
It was a short drive to the Scone Palace
where our group was served lunch. On my
walk around its gardens and grounds, I viewed the large Douglas Fir trees, the
Murray Star Maze and the loud, colorful peacocks. After returning to our hotel, we had dinner
and then a pub crawl.
Murray Star Maze at the Scone Palace
On our last full day of this tour, we
had an excursion to the Trossachs, first going to the small village of Balmahal
on the edge of Loch Lomond. Loch Lomond
was made famous by the song “The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond.” On the shore of the Loch, our guide told us about
its history, and then we hiked up the hill behind us to have views of the
surrounding area. We were glad to be in
good enough condition to do this. After
lunch, we drove to Loch Katrine for a chilly, but relaxing boat ride on the
steamship Sir Walter Scott. Loch Katrine
was the inspiration for the famous 19th century poem, The Lady of the Lake,
by Sir Walter Scott. He was a Scottish
novelist, poet, historian, and biographer who is often considered both the
inventor and the greatest practitioner of the historical novel.
Me aboard the Sir Walter Scott
The farewell dinner that night was in the
hotel. It featured entertainment about
Scotland and was very touristy with plenty of bagpipes. We did enjoy the Scottish dancing. Of course, all the tourists were encouraged
to have some haggis. It is the national
dish of Scotland, a type of pudding composed of the liver, heart, and lungs of
a sheep (or other animal), minced and mixed with beef or mutton, suet and
oatmeal, and seasoned with onion, cayenne pepper and other spices. The mixture
is packed into a sheep's stomach and boiled.
NO THANK YOU!
We said goodbye to our fellow
travelers. They had been a good group for
us to travel with: older, well-read and
educated. This was an aspect of travel
with Road Scholar that we appreciated. Diane
and I were sure that we would be traveling with Road Scholar again.
We had planned a few days on our own in
Edinburg before returning home. We
started by walking to Holyroodhouse and doing an audio tour of the Palace, Abby,
gardens and Queens gallery. I had read
about the Palace being the home of Mary, Queen of Scots. Even though we visited the state apartments,
the throne room and the royal treasures, my favorite part was going up the
narrow, steep and winding staircase to the oldest section of the palace in the
north-west tower. That was where Mary,
Queen of Scots lived between 1561-1567. In
her private apartments, she had witnessed the brutal killing of her
secretary. I thought back to the stories
I had read, and by standing in that space, I could imagine how it all happened.
Holyroodhouse
By now, we had discovered a favorite
lunch place in the city and walked back to town to have a fresh seafood lunch
at Maison Bleue. Our next lodging was at
the Kenneth MacKenzie Suite owned by the University of Edinburgh. Win Horner, one of the women in Diane’s salon
group, had done her dissertation research on Scottish rhetoric at the
University and told us about the lodging.
Not only was it less expensive than a hotel, but it included a full menu
for breakfast. After lunch we went back
to our old hotel and transferred our luggage to the new lodgings, although it
was a challenge to figure out how to store our large bags in the very small
room.
After our great breakfast the next
morning, we walked to the meeting place for our full-day tour “St Andrews &
the Fishing Villages of Fife.” Unfortunately,
our driver, who was also our guide, spoke with such a strong Scottish dialect
that most of what she said was lost on us.
We drove back over the Forth Bridge and headed toward St. Andrews with a
first stop at the fishing villages of Anstruther. We walked along the seafront to the harbor
where it was low tide, leaving the boats sitting on the sand or rocks. We were at about 56 degrees north where there
were the more extreme tides typical of northern latitudes. This is in contrast with Columbia, Missouri
which is only 38 degrees north.
Diane at the fishing village
Our van proceeded to St. Andrews where we
first stopped at the famous golf course.
Then we had too much time allotted to us to walk around the town and
amuse ourselves. Diane and I walked to
the St. Andrews castle, the St. Andrews Cathedral, ate lunch and visited some
shops. We were glad when the tour ended.
St. Andrews
The next day, we went on another tour entitled
“Wizards and Warriors.” The tour’s name
was motivated by the Harry Potter books since one of the castles we would see often
served as a location in the films. However,
our first stop was at the Bamburgh Castle which was unlike other castles we had
visited. It was not on high ground, but
rather stretched along a beach facing the harbor and the North Sea. After lunch, we proceeded to Alnwick Castle
where we saw a class being held for young children on how to mount their brooms
for a game of quidditch. Looking at the
castle, we enjoyed seeing the many recognizable views from the Harry Potter movies.
Young Wizards learning to ride their brooms
On our way back to Edinburgh we stopped at
the Wallace Statue. He was the leader of
the Scottish resistance forces during the first years of the long and finally
successful struggle to free Scotland from English rule at the end of the 13th
century. Our final stop before returning
to Edinburgh was at Scott's View overlooking the valley of the Tweed River,
which is reputed to be one of the favorite views of Sir Walter Scott.
We stopped at the Mussel Inn restaurant to have dinner before returning to our lodging. We were served a big pot of hot mussels cooked in white wine and lots of
bread to sop up the liquid. That and a
bottle of white wine and we were two happy women who thoroughly enjoyed our
stay in Edinburgh, finding it a very manageable city in which to navigate. We imagined visiting this city again someday.