Three cities in 1 week: Sioux Falls, Brooklyn and Edinburgh…a great combo!

First stop Sioux Falls to establish our medical care. It was remarkably efficient…though I think we perplexed them…especially when they asked us where we parked and we told them we walked. We used a combination of uber and then a very pleasant several mile walk across the city. Made sense to us!

Last year we enjoyed the outdoor free concert next to the falls so we went again. Again we did another pleasant couple of miles walk downtown from our hotel with an uber return. And once again so no other “walkers”. Guess you can call us regulars now! Sioux Falls has a nice downtown and while it seems (in my opinion) to lack the vibrancy of other downtowns it seems to be growing in its restaurants and other activities.

This is the singer for the Claudette’s (the second band)…check them out on Facebook…Jazz/Amy Winehouse sound.

Other than the strange cab driver who tried to impress us with his extensive knowledge of Greek mythology (actually following us into the hotel lobby and insisting on carrying our luggage) while chatting away…for another 15 minutes, people were very nice and helpful. Hard to believe that there is a county in South Dakota that voted greater than 90 percent for Trump. Of course, I should mention that the cab driver also made multiple mistakes with his Greek mythology repertoire and overcharged us about double. We also met a group of college students from Mexico City who were there in Sioux Falls…they were staying with families in the area and seemed to be enjoying it.

We also walked through a very interesting veterans memorial (it was interesting because the plaques described exactly why the veteran received awards…wow). It was very informative but we found this statue to be particularly sad:

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Lots of wars…and no signs of slowing down, perhaps even accelerating in frequency and definitely in killing power.

So as we solemnly walked through the park and talked about this, we heard a sudden boom, then one after another, 3 F16s took off within a minute? Had no idea a base was nearby. Very odd timing…kind of eerie. We were the only ones in the park. Where is everyone in Sioux Falls at 5pm?

We were excited to get to attend Kids Day at Flushing Meadows.

And we were even more excited when this guy showed up to play a few practice games. Yup that’s Alcaraz. Never realized both feet come off the ground when he serves. Did I mention that that all the stadiums, music, meet and greets etc were free? Not the Honey Deuce cocktails though, they wanted 23 dollars for those. This was in the Arthur Ashe Stadium. Most of the time you could get front row seating because New Yorkers apparently do not tolerate the full sun on the fronts rows.

Big kids at kids day. After watching several other remarkably agile top seeded players, Maris guided us through the US open crazy crowded streets to excellent dim sum.

Leave it to me to order chicken feet. They were good….sort of.

We appreciate Maris and Gabe’s successful efforts to entertain us on our quick 2 night visit. They stuffed us with delicious burgers etc in their new backyard patio…. A perfect meal to lull us to sleep on our red eye flight to Edinburgh. Well the whiskey and unisom helped too.

The garden (even though full view is blocked by fence) in the back of their brownstone is too pretty not to include. So many beautiful gardens this time of year in nyc

This is the second time we have stayed in this air bnb just 5 minutes from their apartment. We visited on a beautiful sunny weekend and loved the energy of the neighborhood.

They live in an old neighborhood streets lined with brownstones….but enough coffee shops and restaurants to keep it busy. Here’s hoping a new mayor may help find ways to keep it affordable. Off to Edinburgh…..

We were thinking Edinburgh was pretty chill and uncrowded until we got to the royal mile. Clearly everyone in the city that day was walking there. I thought maybe red eye fatigue was exaggerating the numbers in my head but I think the photo proves otherwise. I also think that day was busier than others. Yes, lots of bagpipe music, piano, guitarists, flame throwers etc. interestingly we didn’t run into a lot of American tourists. At one restaurant we met a couple from Saudi Arabia on our right and Chinese family on our left. we also met a young woman from South Korea who had taken the train up from Manchester before starting her 3 or maybe 6 month English course. Her English already seemed very good!

Brant kind of blended in to the buildings here on Victoria street. Not sure what clan this is?(referring to his plaid shirt)

This is a difficult city to convey in pics. There was lot of “Harry Potteresque “ architecture mixed with the serious typical old British Isles city architecture and then that mix of modern stuff stuck in the odd gaps. An easy city to walk, though 18,000 steps after a red eye is pushing it.

Here is a great example. This is the hotel we stayed in. Notice the glass windows attached to it on either side? This beautiful old building was encompassed by a giant glass playhouse. Our room sat on the top of the playhouse looking over the city. A great mix of old and new…loved it. Below you can see the perfect morning spot—or evening whiskey spot.

I hope you can zoom in on these pics. This is Dovecote Studios. You can go up to the observation balcony and watch these weavers. Hundreds and hundreds of balls of yarn. Fascinating painstaking work to make these tapestries…Brant suggested that it could become tedious.

By the way…this was free, but I did pay to go to see (in same studio):

…the IKEA magical print exhibit! Brant opted out of this one but I loved learning the history of textiles at IKEA. I will admit that I was the only one who was in this entire, quite large exhibit. I was tempted to grab some fabric.

We were sorry to have missed the FRINGE festival (actually arrived on last day.) It’s a month long festival of movies, performances, plays and concerts…..pretty much all indie stuff. The city was covered with posters announcing the events of the world’s largest performing arts festival. This year 2.6 million tickets were sold to the various events and we are proud to say we bought 2. While we decided we could not handle a play about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates set to Shakespeare’s Hamlet just 4 hours after our red eye flight, we did listen to an excellent Joni Mitchell impersonator. Little Green made me cry as always and Brant pointed out this is most likely the closest I will ever get to my dream of wandering into a bar and finding Joni strumming her guitar.

I could drink a case of you! … with her dulcimer. She spoke with Joni’s voice (using actual sentences from her interviews) and accent but broke character at the end. As it turns out she has a very British accent and lives in LA. Maybe I just dreamed all this…

We generally avoid bus tours but who can resist 12 hours on a bus to get to see the hairy coos? We decided to just let a little bus take us to Glencoe (our real goal) and 4 million other stops. Sadly we could not sit next to each other because I ran back to room to get a forgotten something and got stuck in elevator. This was very sad because we did not get a window seat but at least we made it! We question if this was best use of time, but we got to see a lot for a reasonable price. I had some whiskey ice cream that was so good. I could have eaten a gallon of it but I wouldn’t have been on my feet…strong stuff.

There is a 97 mile foot path that goes through this area. There are services to move your luggage room to room. Definitely would love to go back and do this.

At last, a new Loch Ness monster siting!

Part of our bus ride was a boat ride on the Loch Ness. I kept waiting for an inflatable Loch Ness monster to pop up out of the lake, but….no they were cheaper and more clever. They just put stickers on the window.

And this would be the hairy coo! This crazy cow ate about 10 carrots from our bus alone.

There were in fact a few honks!

A friend recommended seeing the Rosslyn Chapel so we hopped on the city bus and thanks to all those amazing apps found a place for lunch and walked a bit to it. They began building the chapel in 1446 and it took about 40 years to nearly complete when for the usual variety of reasons it was abandoned….the usual my religion is better than yours plus my soldiers chop off heads better for gods work than yours excuse. I would like to think it is popular because of the remarkable stonework… like stone carved into lace, but another reason for its popularity is that the chapel was an important of the book, Da Vinci Code. We arrived when the power was out so they said we could only look at the outside then look through doors into the dark. The power came back on, so we got to see it both ways and I thought that the chapel lit up with 100s of candles would have been best of all.

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Check out the pillar, someone (who will remain nameless) accidentally took a non flash interior photo (not allowed) and shared it with me. The person who carved that was beheaded for his hard work because he was an apprentice and it made his boss look bad who could not figure how to do it. Yup don’t make your boss look bad.

We liked how the city often had monuments of writers and scientists rather than just military leaders. We did not realize that the physician who discovered and introduced aseptic technique was from here (Lister, MD) or that chloroform was invented here. We learned all this at the Surgeons Museum. Of course after looking at 2 floors of preserved specimens we needed a drink, so we went here: (we could not bring ourselves to taking our pic in front of it and I believe it is the oldest bar in the city)

Edinburgh was an easy city to navigate, less expensive than NYC, people were always friendly and helpful. At times it seemed more like a very big town rather than a city. You could definitely see how the architecture of the city inspired Harry Potter. I took so many pictures of architecture that I will end with some photos of the architecture.

off to the Shetland Islands!