You Learn Something New Every Day! :(

And the lesson of today is...

(a) That thing about confirming flights 24 hours in advance...they mean it.
(b) Check your junk email box
(c) Aer Lingus Sucks!
(d) All of the above.

Yep, it's (d) - with a strong emphasis on C.

Randy & I went to check in for our 3:30pm Munich flight, only to be told that supposedly on February 9, the airline emailed me to say that oops! they sold me a flight they didn't intend to operate and we should instead check in for a 7:00am flight from Dublin to Munich.

This would have been quite a feat since we were booked on Aer Lingus #256 at 9:00 am from Edinburgh to Dublin.

With no further flights to Munich today, they offered to send us to Dusseldorf or Frankfurt, where we could spend another $500 on train tickets to arrive very late at night in Munich OR we could be stranded for 24 hours. So much we could say here but I'll save it for the letter we will no doubt have to write to the suits at Aer Lingus.

On to nicer things...
Sunday, we had a nice lunch at Gowanbank after church service at Darvel Gospel Hall. It was great to be back there and experience the sense of family we had there three years ago with friends and new acquaintances. Isabel made a great lunch and finished it off with rice pudding and tiramisu (two desserts, of course!):

(This is Joseph, but we secretly call him Mr. Burns...excellent!)

The concert that night was a small affair but a fun one. We sold a few cds and had just a few more pounds than what we needed to get back to Euro-land. Doug (our promoter) and his wife Kerstin were so much fun, we felt like we had known them all our life. There were so many parallels in our lives, it was uncanny and we really hope that they will come to Denver soon for a visit!

Monday morning, we set off for Edinburgh on the megabus - two tickets for a total of ₤4 just can't be beat! We had a busy day of visiting the castle and touring Mary King's Close but first, we had to get some food. We found this little place called Maxies that didn't look like much fro the outside but it turned out to be just great inside.

When Randy tried the local beer called Innis and Gunn here, he fell in love!

Mary King's Close doesn't allow cameras down inside (except the one that THEY take your photo with for a mere ₤6.00) but you read about it here:

http://www.realmarykingsclose.com/

or google for images--there are some photo sharing sites like flickr where people have shared images that they may or may not have had permission to take!

It was creepy to be walking underground and thinking about families living in such poverty with no shoes and no sunlight and raw sewage and rats everywhere. No wonder there was so much disease in Edinburgh in the early 1600's! It was very depressing, but then we had to laugh a bit when they took us to the haunted room of Annie...

Annie was a small girl who died of the plague back in that time, and when a psychic came into the room where Annie died, she was overwhelmed with sadness. She saw a little girl who had lost her doll and immediately ran out to buy a doll. Once the doll was placed in the room, the sadness left. Is it possible that after hundreds of years of haunting the room, all that Annie required for eternal peace was a tartan Barbie? Come on! I like a good ghost story, but in this case, I'll stick with the hymn writer--I'd rather have Jesus.

Before we fly out tomorrow, I'll try to post some photos of Edinburgh Castle.