Scotland - A novel

What an AMAZING adventure! Here are my stories (James may have different versions. If he would like to share, he is free to draft a blog):

The plan
According to our GPS, it was going to take me 5 hours to drive from Alderley Park (where I work) to Dundee, Scotland (where James was staying as he had a meeting in Dundee on Friday morning). I was going to work from the hotel Friday and then we were going to drive down to St. Andrews for golf on Saturday and Sunday.  The Old Course at St. Andrews was closed Friday and Saturday for a local tournament. It is closed every Sunday so "locals can enjoy walking the famous links." This is, undoubtedly, the worst use of a world-renowned, beautiful golf course I have ever heard of. Seriously? You are closing an entire golf course so people can walk around? Goodness me. I digress. We pre-booked a tee time for Sunday on The Jubilee Course, but we could only walk-on on The New Course on Saturday so we were playing that by ear.

The drive
On Thursday afternoon, I took off shortly after 4PM to head to Dundee. It took, what seemed like forever, getting through Manchester. Lots of traffic. I eventually hit the highway. It gets dark around 4:45 so I knew most of the drive would be in the dark. It took about 2 hours to get to Scotland and I had another - at least - 2.5 hours to go. So far, the weather is perfect. A few notes about driving in the UK:

• There are no lights on the highway (or very few and only in certain sections). To rectify this problem, people often drive with their high beams on. This is bad on a number of levels. If the car on your side of the highway has their high beams on and you pass that person, the high beams blind you in your rear view. Then there's the obvious problem with the people in the opposing lane.
• The drivers are VERY picky about passing lanes. Picture this, I'm in the middle lane (keep in mind, the FAST lane is the RIGHT lane of the highway). A car pulls up behind me in the LEFT (slow) lane and is going faster than I. There is no one else around us and said driver opts to pull behind me, then over into the right lane, then back in front of me, and then back into the left lane. I thought this was just a one-off oddity until it happened 4 times in the span of a couple of hours. There was very little time when I wasn't around other cars.
• The radio stations are all the same - effectively. So there are abou15 stations along the ride from which to choose and each station has the same announcer/song playing on 3 or 4 stations. So everytime I hit "scan" I had to listen to the same song 3 or 4 times before finally getting to a new song/station.

And about our lovely car. The new car - a Peugeot something-or-other - is a POS (not to be confused with Jeff Argus' company). James hates that it doesn't have cruise control (not a problem for a driver like me, but definitely a problem for him). It is an automatic, but it changes gears like a manual. It actually stops accelerating and then shifts. It's also a hatchback, which means it's big and means it still sucks to park in our tiny little parking space. Anyhoo, a few notes about the windshield wipers (which are a critical piece of equipment when you are driving in the rain):

• The windshield wipers clear the passenger side first (not convenient).
• The windshield wipers, as they return to their starting position, flick water from the passenger blade directly into my line of sight on the drivers side (not convenient).
• The windshield wipers have 3 speeds: intermittent, slow, and slower (REALLY not convenient when you are drivng in rainy Scotland).

Then the wather changed and it sucked. (Mom, dad, and James, please stop reading here). I'm fairly certain I should have died a few times. The big trucks kicking up the water, trying to pass them with very little visibility, and I don't drive slow. I divulge my speed, but I'll say I made a 5 hour drive, with 16 minutes of traffic (based on the GPS) in 4 hours and 30 minutes. I arrived safe and sound (except for my random knee injury). The hotel in Dundee was awesome. It overlooked a lake/river/some body of water with a huge bridge. The moon looked awesome, it was beautiful.

Exploring St. Andrews
We traveled to St. Andrews Friday afternoon. I had a bunch of calls for work until after 4 so we took off exploring St. Andrews after that. It was SO COLD and the wind was blowing quite strong. We stopped first by The University of St. Andrews. Lovely campus. Stumbled upon St. Andrews Castle and eventually to St. Andrews Cathedral. We didn't go in any because they were closed by the time we got there (plus I'm planning on taking my parents there at which time we'll explore in more detail). Took loads of pictures and eventually found our way to a non-touristy, non-taken-over-by-college-kids bar called the Whey Pat Tavern. It was AWESOME. Great local beers, reasonably priced, and loads of really friendly folks. We ended up staying much longer than anticipated on account of meeting an overly friendly gentlemen (and we weren't in a rush anyway).  Had an okay meal at a local restaurant and headed for bed early on account of golf the next time.

We tried as many Scottish beers as we could and we loved quite a few of them. I think my favorites were actually St. Andrews Ale (could have been the picture on the bottle that sold me, but honestly, the beer was really good) and Fraoch. The pubs are pretty cool.

It is such a great little city with so much history and charm. The buildings are beautiful and it is so quaint. And all the people are so nice (I now know where I get it.....my grandfather was born in Scotland so that's must be why I'm so nice :-) HAHAHA!!). Anyway, can't wait to go back!

The golf
Golfing in St. Andrews is everything it's cracked up to be........if you're into that kind of thing. James is not a windy-weather golfer. I love golf, but don't like playing poorly (which I did). Saturday we got off on the New Course at about 10:20 or so. It is a great little track, but - for my taste - didn't leave a huge impression. There were not a lot of holes that I though "wow, that was a great hole." It was windy - they indicated 15 MPH and it was cold (about 28 degrees), but it was SUNNY and there wasn't a drop of rain the entire day! The back 9 was much warmer than the front. James kicked my BUTT. It was quite humorous because on several holes, we couldn't have been farther apart. He was hooking the hell out of the ball and I was slicing the hell out of the ball. The Old Course, the New Course, and the Jubilee Course all run parallel to each other at certain points. When we were playing the New Course (it's in the middle of the Old Course and the Jubilee Course), there were several holes where James was left on the Old Course, and I was right on the Jubilee Course. It was funny after a while (and then not funny when I couldn't figure out what I was doing). 

Uber frustrating were these stupid little mats we had to hit off of in the fairway. Admittedly, James and I (with our hooking and slicing) didn't need the fairway mats all that often, but when we did, it was very difficult and I actually broke my mat once (managed to put it back together). That part sucked, but, like I said, we weren't in the fairway all that much anyway :-)

We had a great day and enjoyed really awesome beverages afterwards. Local brews - really good stuff.

We played The Jubilee Course on Sunday. It was MUCH warmer - 45 degrees - but there was 35 MPH winds so it felt like 36. And when I say there were 35MPH winds, I don't mean "gusts up to" or "at a max." I mean there were CONSISTENT 35 mph winds.  I liked the Jubilee Course much better (coincidentally, I fould my swing so that helped a lot). The holes were a lot more memorable, the fairways had more character, and there was a lot more trouble.  It really is a completely different game to what we play back home.

The pictures will tell a lot more about our golfing experience, but a few notes:

• There were SEVERAL - not just 1 or 2 - SEVERAL holes where James' tee box was IN FRONT of mine AND par was the same. My favorite example is #11 on The Jubilee Course. It was a 500+ yard par five, DIRECTLY into the (35MPH) wind. James' tee box is FORTY YARDS (at least) in front of my tee box...........and it's a par 5 for him as well. WHAT?!?!?!
• The courses were both relatively flat. My knee was okay walking on these courses. Had we been in Ireland playing the courses we played last summer, I would not have been able to play (I can walk, but can't do steps or hills or running).
• Greens in Scotland were in much better shape - even in the dead of winter - than the greens in Ireland - which we played in the dead of summer (and it was a similar temperature, wetter, and about the same wind speed). Hmmm. 
• Scottish golf and Irish golf are completely different (granted I've only played 2 courses in Scotland and they were both at St. Andrews).

Pictures available: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151430458029653.515163.755859652&type=1&l=6e621b9b8d