See Me Now

       Upon returning from long vacations, I typically feel like no time at all has passed here at home. It’s a weird feeling, as if I’ve disappeared Outlander style, yet returned to pick up just minutes from when I left off.   It’s not as if I’ve crossed over into some parallel reality for the vacation’s duration – a parallel reality / timeline would proceed apace with my regular one.   Rather, it feels as if I’ve jumped to some perpendicular reality/timeline in which my experiences barely overlap with my usual routine.  I’ve also found that the longer I’m gone, the more intense this sensation. Years ago, I returned from six weeks away. Everything in my house felt and looked the same except that I had to blink away some strange aura shimmering around all my stuff, as if it had been held in suspension. On my first day back this time, I looked for evidence that my regular life had leapt forward three weeks. I noticed that the saplings newly plant...

          Before traveling to the UK, we obsessed over the weather forecasts, figuring that there is no way we wouldn’t experience plenty of rain and/or wind. We came equipped with wet riding gear and the forecasts made it seem like our rain gear would be put to frequent use. But by some miracle, we experienced zero rain from the time we arrived, all through our Backroads tour, and through our Eurobike tour . . . until today.   From our hotel this morning, we checked the rain forecast a zillion times (it’s different each time) and were pretty confident that we had a rain-free window from around 11am to 6pm to ride from Kelso to Innerleithen .   We set out around 10:45 and within 20 minutes, we were in light mist that morphed into real rain that came and went for most of our 30 mile ride.   We stopped at this church and stood under a protective tree for a while but soon realized we just needed to suck it up and go.       ...

          Every restaurant or pub we have encountered has majorly advertised that it is dog-friendly.   And yes, we’ve seen so many Brits accompanied by dogs on their walks, in the hotels, and in restaurants.  This is the house-restaurant dog that haunted us at last night’s dinner.   I think his name was something like Boba.             And here are the canine offerings at The Mason Arms Pub (that we visited twice in one night) in Warkwortth.             Another thing: there is a dearth of salads here in the UK. Most restaurants have maybe a side salad of sad greens, or a so-called Caesar salad (tourist salad) that is nothing like a real Caesar salad.   However, the fish and chips just about anywhere are awesome. And they do chips (fries) well.   The Hubs ordered lasagna and it came with a hefty side of chips.     my fish and chips with a side ...

          Backroads provides pretty nice road bikes:   titanium frames, SRAM electronic shifting, and disc brakes. They’re well maintained of course but even so, each of us dropped a chain at some point.   The most dramatic was Nusa’s, our guide.   She must have kept pedaling after it slipped because it wound itself around a crank and into the worse chain mangle I’ve ever seen.   She ended up walking a short spell back to our hotel (her co-guide didn’t see her distress-text), where we all marveled at the sight.              As always, the cycling routes that Backroads devised were great – a mix of rollers, challenge climbs, and gorgeous scenery.   The Scottish Highlands are truly beautiful and special.                At the conclusion to the Backroads tour, we took a train to Newcastle, England where our self-guided tour (organized by Eurobike a...

Here are a few of my learnings:   ·        Highland Games   This is Kyle Randalls.                              Not only is he big, really big, but he is a really big deal when it comes to the Highland Games. He is incredibly personable, and  a major Highland Games champion which we learned about on our last day of the Backroads tour.                    One of the most important things Kyle 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 straight in front of the thrower (scored as landing at 12:00). Hopefully, this video of Kyle doing this will load to the blog and you ca...