December 2019: Scotland 1984 and 2020 (postponed)

Ready for my fifth visit to the great northern European city of Edinburgh. [NOTE: The trip had been booked in late December 2019 for an April 2020 visit. When Covid hit in March 2020, things fell apart. British Airways was good enough o provide travel vouchers for two overseas trips we had in place at that time, for the UK and for Italy. Years later, for a May 2022 Edinburgh trip, we cashed in those vouchers for business class tickets to Edinburgh. That trip was great: Gaby ran the marathon. She found great food. We made a bucket-list trip to the Isle of Skye. We spent two nights gleaming in Mallaig. We rode the Harry Potter train route between Glasgow and Mallaig.]

My first visit to Edinburgh was a brief one, summer of 1984. Again the following summer. Almost thirty years later -- November 2014 -- I took the family for their first visit. We returned the following Christmas. Tonight we embark on our third family visit -- sans Jane, headed for Wisconsin -- and a late summer fling before we resume the much more serious business of moving to our Touchdown home in early October.

What is it that I like about Edinburgh? It really started with England, and a visit there with my dad and three brothers around Easter 1964. Dad had served as a navigator in World War II, based in East Anglia, north of London. We visited the museum dedicated t the men of the Eighth Army Air Force in Norwich. I wrote my first serious research paper in high school in recognition of his service, a study of the American air forces in western Europe in the war.

Almost twenty years later, searching for a summer study abroad option, I was fortunate to have Cary Cooper, a now-famous professor from Manchester and a native of the United States, assist to creating the first business summer study abroad program for the University of Kansas. The following year we expanded the program from Manchester to two weeks in St Andrews as well. In both years I visited Edinburgh and found it to be much more like the England I had first met in 1964. London had become a different place and by the time of our family visit to Scotland fifty years after my first visit, Edinburgh was our interest and London was almost an afterthought.

From all of my trips I developed a fondness for the wilder, more rural parts of what is actually a pretty small island. The entire English isle is about the size of the state of Wisconsin, and while south, midlands and southeast in particular are densely populated, much of the north and west are rural and majestically wild, even if the height of their mountains pale in comparison to our Rockies. Try climbing Snowden in Wales, or Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh, and you will know the joy of what I mean.

Stories and photos to follow. We will sorely miss Jane and Gaby will make her own trip to continental Europe, using Edinburgh as a starting point. Jane is into serious adulting and has some interesting employment prospects in southeast Wisconsin. More later. Stay happy. Find joy where you can.