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Cultural Notes

Here are a few of my learnings:   ·        Highland Games   This is Kyle Randalls.                      Not only is he huge, he is incredibly personable.   And he is a major champion when it comes to the traditional Highland Games, that we learned about on our last day of the Backroads tour.   One of the most important things he told us is that Highland Games competitors are required to wear something underneath their kilts. Then, he demonstrated several events for us, the craziest of which is the “tossing the caber” event.   The objective of this is to flip the caber over itself and have it land aligned with the thrower (scored as landing at 12:00). Hopefully, this video of Kyle doing this will load to the blog and you can see his amazing strength and accuracy.       We witnessed his demonstration at The Braemar Highland Game Center , which is described li...
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Time Flew . . .

  . . . because we're having fun!           We’ve already finished phase 1 of our trip; this blog got away from me but here’s a bit of catch-up.           We spent our last free day in Edinburgh in overcast weather doing the usual tourist things, including trekking up to the castle, which usually has a spectacular view of the new town, but here’s the view we had:           Luckily the weather cleared again the next day when we met up with our Backroads group, and we had uncharacteristically beautiful weather for the entire week of our rides.   Soooo lucky!   There were just 4 of us rider-guests on this tour, accompanied by 2 guides, so it was a chill experience all around.   A few highlights:           Returning from our day 2 ride.  The white buildings in the background are our accommodations overlooking Loch Rannoch. Loch Rannoch with Schie...
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“Someone” Needs to Get It Together

               We’re here in Edinburgh and it’s not raining!   After months of anticipating / worrying about cold and rainy conditions, we’ve lucked into a stretch of intensely sunny, warm days and pleasantly cool nights.   The forecast shows just one hour of rain coming this morning; I’ll be surprised if it really happens. Our journey here was mostly smooth, but I’ve learned that it isn’t a true vacation unless its logistics are threatened in some way by the airline industry.   In this case, it was that our long flight from Chicago to Dublin was delayed by over an hour because “someone locked the hangar door where the plane was.”   When we finally did arrive in Dublin, we had to wait on board awhile because “someone had to be called to extend the jetway” for us to walk through to the terminal. Luckily, we made our last connection, but after we landed in Edinburgh, we again waited on the tarmac while “someone” scrambled ...
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