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Published: April 27th 2007
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Path to the Youth Hostel in Rowardennan on the Banks of Loch Lomond
Liz Muir I arrived in London Heathrow Airport at 5:30 am on the 27th with three hours until my connection to Glasgow. I spent the first two hours running through the rat race that is Heathrow airport. The ceilings were really low so the halls feel all squat and square, and you end up in these hugely long lines that snake through the airport with no sense whatsoever. After making it through that, I made my first food purchase in the UK: an Aero bar, of course, only the best candy bar in Britain! My flight to Glasgow was slightly delayed because they had some trouble getting off the luggage that needed to go on other planes.
I finally arrived in Glasgow about an hour late. I picked up my luggage without any trouble, but it was really hard to manage with only one hand. Luckily, as I was exiting the airport, I saw Jordan, a guy who’s in my study abroad. We switched bags for the short walk over to the hotel where our professor was staying.
After taking a minute to catch my breath, I went with one other girl and my professor (John Bennion) to buy groceries
for the first weekend of the trip at Asda, which is a British store owned by Wal-Mart. (They have the same “Always Low Prices” slogan and everything.) I thought it was extremely ironic because I dislike Wal-Mart and don’t shop there at home and it ended up being the first place I went in Scotland. Drat. I found out that at least this Asda doesn’t sell celery, which is bad because I practically live off that stuff at home.
A conversation between my professor and me at Asda:
Me: Uh, John, do we have anything to put on the sandwiches?
John: Yes, I’ve got mayo, salad cream, and mustard.
Me: No, I meant like meat or peanut butter or something.
John: Oh! (Runs out to grab some.)
After we finished shopping and packed all the food in the program van (which by complete coincidence BYU as the last three letters on its license plate), we drove back to the hotel, where almost everyone was waiting for us. We were still missing two girls—one who was supposed to be in sometime this morning and hadn’t shown up yet, and one whose flight arrived in about an hour. John
stayed behind to wait for them with the van while all the rest of us piled into the bus we had rented to take us to Balmaha.
Balmaha was the beginning of our eight mile hike to the Rowardennan Youth Hostel on Loch Lomond where we would be staying for three nights. Although the hike wasn’t particularly hard—rolling hills and sometimes even following the road—it seemed terrible because we were all hiking it on jet lag and with no lunch. We were supposed to meet our professor at a half-way point on the beach for lunch, but after he didn’t show up, we figured we’d just continue on to the hostel.
Just as we were almost to the hostel and completely exhausted, Karla (John’s wife) arrives with the van! Yay! Apparently John had gotten lost on the way to the hostel and one of the two girls had lost her luggage. (Poor Claire—she puts on a really good face about it though—at least she was wearing her hiking clothes on the plane!)
We check into our rooms which have these cool “sleeping bag” sheets—I like them a lot. They have a pillow case at the top and
are connected at the bottom so you don’t have to actually put the sheets over the mattress: you just lie it on top and sleep. It’s very efficient.
Anyway, I got a ride in the van the rest of the way to the hostel (about half a mile) because my group was in charge of making dinner. We made a huge batch of sloppy joes in this little tiny kitchen. We had to improvise the recipe because apparently they don’t have sloppy joe mix in England, but the pasta sauce/shepherd’s pie seasoning mix worked out all right.
They had a computer at the hostel which we all used to promptly check our email. (Unfortunately, a ton of people need to use it, so I’m typing this up on Joni’s computer to post later—thanks love!)
I was so totally exhausted from the hike that I had no trouble getting to sleep in spite of the jet lag. I highly recommend an eight mile hike as the perfect cure for the time zone problem. :D
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