An Adventure

So thanksgiving was pretty good. I went to dinner at my friend Megan's friends' place. The food was excellent, there was more turkey, stuffing, mashed tatties, and pumpkin pie than I could eat! I was over there for a couple hours and then I headed towards the tun, which is a bar close to the parliament. I found Martin and Miles mostly drunk, and they proceeded to finish off a couple more bottles of wine. After that, Miles went home, but Martin insisted on having another round. The Tun was closing so we went up a road to the Canonsgait. Shortly after, Martin disappeared to the toilet and was gone for close to fifteen mins. After he got back, he was ready to go. A couple of the other guys in the bar wanted to call him a taxi, but he insisted he was capable of walking home, so I walked most of the way with him to make sure he was alright. And although he was definitely stumbling around, it was a ton of fun. We were singing Scottish folk songs at the top of our lungs through holyrood park and it was just a good time.

On Friday, I decided that I was going on an adventure, and showed up to the train station around 10 without a clue where I was going to end up or stay that night. I got a train to York and stayed the night there at a hostel. In the early afternoon as I was walking around the hostel, I found a brochure for the Yorkshire Dales, which is supposedly a national park. I found the trail to be under par - in fact, it took me the better part of the first hour of the day to find it out of Gargrave. After I finally got set on the trail, I encountered sheep, sheep, and more sheep. I almost got rammed. I came across a pack of probably 15 rams grazing a field in the middle of the trail; on my right, I had a river and on the left, a stone wall. I had no choice but try to sneak around the edge of them. As I was about half way, one of the rams looked straight at me. He hunched his body and then made as if to charge. My blood went cold. It was that same feeling I get when I see a cop's sirens light up behind me. Then, for some reason, he stopped and went back to eating. Relieved that I was still in one peice, I moved along. By this time, it was only about 3:30 and the sun was setting behind the clouds, so i did my best to make good time from there on to Malham, which was about 3 miles more. I pulled into Malham around 5:30 and showered, and generally relaxed and tryed to figure out where I was going to go the next day.

I settled on Settle. Because it was Sunday, the trains are on a reduced schedule, not to mention the construction on the track, it was my best shot of getting back to Edinburgh as it was the biggest town around - if anywhere had a train, it would be there. The first hour and a half to settle was a hard climb. At some points, the map showed a 20 deg. gradient, it was slow going for me because it was so steep, and although the maximum altitude was only like 550 feet, that seems rough when I just gained nearly 300 of it in an hour. The trail on Sunday was excellent, there were few muddy spots and those were easy enough to get around, so I was into Settle just a little after midday. Where I waited then 3 hours for the train to get back to Leeds to get to York to get home.