Following our wonderful stay in Ireland, we returned to Glasgow for about a week or so, mostly to go to the Celtic Connections festival.
Our fantastic land-lady, Jennifer, picked us up from the airport and we all went out to dinner. Then she took us to our hostel, located conveniently in the city center, and helped us unload our luggage into the place. Aaaaaand that's when the first adventurous part of our Glasgow return began...
The hostel was an absolute pig sty, utterly filthy and downright unhealthy to stay in. Jennifer would have nothing of it, and practically refused to let us stay there. She insisted that we return to her apartment for the week, and after only a short (very short) deliberation we agreed. SO... back to Albert Drive we went! Bless Jennifer - she's so sensible!
Wonderful Jennifer, and little ol' us. We took this just before we headed to Ireland.
That was Tuesday night, and Wednesday was equally eventful. We returned to the College of Piping, and we both sat our Grade 2 Bagpipe exams. And we passed!! Huzzah! We're now Grade 2 Pipers! (That means that we're pretty good on the practice chanters, and actual pipes are still a ways off. But we're going one step at a time, and we're thrilled with our progress!)
Thursday evening we headed for our first and most exciting Celtic Connections concert: Chris Stout and Finley MacDonald. Here's a link showing some really exciting piping and fiddling by the duo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3r97gyxGoE
Well, here's how the concert turned out...
Yup. That's the Scottish A&E (Accidents and Emergencies) that she's reclining within. Not cool. A cyclist came into our lane on the cycle path, and a physical impossibility ensued: two objects trying to occupy the same space at the same time. The real problem with that is that they were both moving at a decent clip when they collided. Melinda went over the handlebars and landed on her jaw on the cycle path. The result is two broken front teeth, some pretty good gashes on her lips and chin, and a lot of sore spots all over and in unexpected places.
That's Melinda, after we cleaned her up a bit. And, bless Jennifer, she retrieved us from the hospital very late that night, bought a bag of ice for Melinda, and loaned us her blender and smoothie-maker for the rest of our short stay.
The rest of our short time in Glasgow was recovery time for Melinda, but we did manage to make some of the concerts we'd booked. We even went to a couple singing workshops - learning to sing in Gaelic! It's a lot of fun, though a bit tongue-twisty, and it was healing for Melinda to lose herself in song for a while. We went to a couple other concerts, too, including a large piping concert and Alt and Boreas- they were wonderful. It was a treat to be temporarily transported away from the pain of the preceding few days and get lost in music.
The picture above is from a piping concert at Celtic Connections. On stage was SEVENTEEN bagpipes ... And they still mic'd it and amplified it! Lemme tell you, when there's SEVENTEEN bagpipes in a concert hall they do NOT need to be amplified!
As this is written, it's been almost two weeks since the collision, and we're at a dentist in Amsterdam. The prognosis is good, but it'll be a long road. The dentist here says he may be able to save the teeth, and he's working on one of the teeth now, but it's still going to take extensive long-term care to get it sorted out once we return to the US.
We went over three thousand miles on our bikes in Scotland, and after all that it took a fraction of a second over the span of a few feet to change our lives forever. Melinda land in the green patch of road shown above, and even had a patch of green paint embedded in her teeth for over a week.
Her bike suffered, too, thanks for asking, but it was quick and easy to fix.
We're trying to understand why it happened, but some things just are. We're bound and determined to continue our adventure, but we're quite not sure what's going to happen next. First and foremost, and not up for debate, is that Melinda's health comes first. If we can get her teeth well taken care of then we'll keep roaming. But if we can't get her well taken care of then we'll head for home, get her teeth taken care of, and we'll do Tour Deux. But we'll just have to wait and see.
Not to distract you too much, but here's some other fun stuff about our last day or so in the UK.
We left the UK via Newcastle, in England. We had a great day in Newcastle before heading to the ferry that took us to Amsterdam.
Beautiful view over the Tyne, and the fabulous bridges that span it.
A memorial to James Hill of Bottlebank, Northumbrian fiddler extraordinaire, and "the finest exponent of the Newcastle hornpipe style."
Melinda playing her dream keyboard: a red Nord Piano 2!!! It's made it to the very short list of souvenirs we want to take back to the States with us (along with bagpipes, border pipes, Uillean pipes, two kilts, an Irish flute, concertina, button accordion, and a bouzouki). It'll be tough to carry on the bike, but we'll find a way!
The Black Gate to the Newcastle Castle.
The boat that will take us to Amsterdam. It's HUGE!!
Leaving the Tyne and heading into the North Sea. It wasn't too rough that night: much smoother than our previous excursion on the North Sea when we barfed our way from Aberdeen to Shetland!
We'll fill you in a bit on our Amsterdam days shortly. There will be tales to tell of .... Dentistry. And coffee shops. And a few tasty Belgian beers!
