#97 September 10, 2022. Nomad Diary. Move to Edinburgh. Hotel Stay. Weeklong Housesit Begins with Mini Schnauzer Hamish.
Saturday Activities. 10. Today the weather has cleared and we decide to take a longer walk of 2 ½ miles to the Colinton Tunnel. It has good reviews for a mural. We enjoyed the wooded walk beside the river Leith and the tunnel was fabulous. Hamish went with us and kept up his pace well. We walked back to our house and took a small break and then left Hamish in his crate as we went grocery shopping.
Week’s Highlights.
Friday. 9. We stay in most of the day except for walks with Hamish. There is heavy rain today. The laundry is hanging inside Lorna’s drying closet in her kitchen to finish drying. We have lunch at the Park Bistro. Turns out that we go here several times during our week here. There just isn’t much else close to us that has a variety to choose from or the ambiance that this cafe has.
Wednesday. 7. We enjoy a long walk with Hamish after breakfast. Later we go on our own and walk by a canal. We go to five groceries that are all next to each other about two blocks from our house. We get more food. While we are shopping a big down pour comes. Our laundry that I hung out on the line and was almost dry gets half soaked! It clears enough for us to have a nice dinner in the garden.
Tuesday. 6. Today we wake up to our rained on view out of our hotel in Edinburgh. We decide to go out to a breakfast restaurant next to the Royal Mile. It was a lovely walk in the light misty rain. It’s just cool this morning and very nice to be out walking. Breakfast is delicious! Our check out is at 11am. Our housesitting host Lorna is coming to pick us up and take us to her house. She arrives on time and we load our luggage in clear weather. In our ride with Lorna, she takes us a long way to her house and we are able to talk and get to know each other a bit more. Once we arrive at her and her husband’s house, she gives us a tour. We get to give their pet Schnauzer named Hamish a snack so that he will know us and approve of us. Once we have all of our instructions, Lorna and Allie take off for their vacation. We go out to grocery shop close to the house to get supplies before predicted rains. We enjoy a walk with Hamish and an evening settling into our weeklong stay.
Monday. 5. Today we have train tickets that leave Newcastle going to Edinburgh close to noon. Our challenge is taking all of our gear with us on the trip. We each have a large suitcase and a backpack. My suitcase is close to 45 pounds. It has sturdy wheels and an extending handle making it fairly easy to handle. It is still heavy and Darrell is usually right by me helping with lifting and moving in and out. We get to the Newcastle train station with time to eat an early lunch and wait for our train. Once we get on the train, the ride is about 90 minutes and some places we can see the coast from the windows. We arrive to a sunny Edinburgh and walk to our close hotel and check in. Our room is super nice and we are excited to be here with the sunshine. We take a few minutes to get settled and leave our luggage in our room and take off to go to the Royal Mile. We have been here once before in 2019, and we are so excited to go see it again. We spend the afternoon walking up the street and around some side streets. We stop and have tea and cake. Then we later have a quick dinner before going back to our hotel for the evening and rest.
Sunday. 4. We go early into Newcastle to stop and have a cappuccino before heading off to church for our second time with this group. Darrell is ready to preach today, and he does a good job with his topic of Elijah’s depression and reactions to being and feeling alone while serving God. I got to talk a little to a Nigerian man named Jumbo who is in navigation school in South Shields. He will graduate and get a job on a ship in November. I also got a picture of some of the kids and their parents. One family from Nigeria with 3 small children and then the Alabama family with their 4 children. We plan to go over to Jacob and Katy’s house after we have lunch and get chiropractic treatments and visit. We stay visiting with them until 5 or 6 pm and I am quite tired. We take the Metro back to North Shields and prepare to check out tomorrow.
Nomad Notes: Our last couple of days at North Shields we tried to eat up our foods that we had purchased. Darrell made pancakes because it takes less eggs and we had maple syrup and yogurt. We took a bottle of laundry soap to a family at church and a couple of other items that were useable. We move on different days of the week and sometimes we don’t have the luxury to give items away because the airbnb says to clean all personal items out. So we do throw some things away that we don’t want to carry with us. We have figured out that some items are good for snacking while we are traveling like a few crackers and cheese, fruit, or boiled eggs.
It is hard to understand living this way when we have been used to living our own house where we can store, use, or share surplus items. We wonder how we can ‘afford’ this kind of living where we don’t buy the cheapest items and we eat out often, but our overall budget through a year seems to be working out. Darrell keeps up with adding our spends to his complex spreadsheet as well as to the simpler Mint accounting app.
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