Seeking

  I reached Inverness after a 3 ½ hour train ride north from Edinburgh. Inverness is a much less dramatic city than Edinburgh, relatively flat, lying along the banks of the River Ness (which empties Loch Ness). You see quite a number of villages and towns in Scotland that begin with ‘Inver’, because in Gaelic ‘Inver’ means ‘the mouth of’. Inverness is ‘the mouth of the (River) Ness’. Others sharing this prefix include Inversnaid and Inverarnan, along the West Highlands Way, where those rivers empty into Loch Lomond. The train ride passes through the Highlands on the way north (where…

Getting into Edinburgh from the airport is easy: you take the Airlink 100 bus outside the terminal (ticket office is there) to downtown. I stepped off the bus, walked 100 meters, and saw this: Saint John’s Cathedral, with the castle looming on the hill in the background. Spectacular. If you like rocky prominances and castles, Edinburgh has them. I liked this city within 5 minutes. This castle looked like a real, hard-to-storm fortress, high on this rocky hill. The castle from up in ‘old town’, from the back. Lots of dramatic old stone buildings set high on the hill. There…

Dublin was my first destination as I started my first summer in Europe. I rented an apartment from AirBnB, which turned out to be in one of the older, run-down sections of Dublin near the Guiness brewery, and my initial impression was not too favorable.     An Irish pub band puts it this way: “I met my love by the gas yard wall Dreamed a dream by the old canal I kissed my girl by the factory wall Dirty old town, dirty old town.” –The Dubliners However, given time, and looking in the right places, Dublin grew on me.…