We arrive safely in Edinburgh

Well, here we are finally at our first B&B in Scotland. We arrived here without much in the way of trouble or inconvenience and our luggage showed up right along with us. Right now it's raining, just to make us feel welcome, but when we got here the sun was shining -- not like in Nevada, but shining nevertheless. Pictured here is Concetta next to the Mini Cooper we rented. I think it's probably a blast to drive, but so far I've been so nervous driving on the "wrong" side of the road I've scarcely noticed. It's a six-speed gear box, as they call it, which is neat. Driving on the left side feels pretty natural once you do it for awhile. We practiced by "pretending to be lost" while exiting the airport. We just drove in circles for about 30 minutes while I got the hang of it. Finally, once we figured out the GPS (and fed it the correct address) we found our way to the expressway and off we went. Soon after we arrived in Portobello, the location of our B&B.

The trip almost didn't get off the ground -- literally. Our Reno plane was well over an hour late taking off, which allowed me to deduce one thing for certain: Boeing 767s do not operate on LINUX. How do I know this? Well, when we wanted to take off from Reno yesterday the plane refused to "boot up" properly. Three times they shut the systems completely down, and three times they powered it up before we were ready to pull away from the gate. From this I deduced that the 767 must run on Windows which still requires such foolishness. They told us that all the systems just refused to come online. Ah huh. Those of you from Technology will certain be familiar with that scenario. I stopped short of asking the crew if the cockpit had a memory card reader.

Anyway, since I always insist on a two-hour layover between flights we managed to make our connection in Salt Lake City with twenty minutes to spare. But things were indeed tense there for awhile.

A word about babies: Crying -- even screaming -- babies are a fact of life on airliners. It's best to be prepared. We bought Bose "noise-canceling" headphones to isolate us from unavoidable background clutter. They don't actually cancel all noise but still do a darn good job if you crank the volume up on your IPOD or airplane sound system. We had an ornery little critter on two of our four flights who probably drove his nearest neighbors to harbor thoughts of homicide by the end of the ordeal.

But that's not the only problem with airline travel. You may be as close to heaven as you're ever going to get when traveling at 35,000 feet. However, inside the plane things are not so heavenly. In an effort to use fuel as conservatively as possible, flights are more packed than ever before. Every seat is taken and every square inch of overhead bin space is taken as well. Best to make sure you arrange to get on the plane early so you can stow your gear. Otherwise, you may have it under your feet for several hours. I suspect that the way airline pack folks into those aluminum people-movers should probably be monitored by the Geneva Convention for evidence of cruel and unusual punishment.

But hey, there was one thing that wowed me. The seat-back computer displays for games, TV shows, and Movies is absolutely terrific. You can punch up your plane's progress on the globe, watch any one of a dozen movies, listen to CD albums, and compete in a trivia game against your fellow passengers, all without leaving your seat or straining to see. That's way cool!

Anyway, we're here and we just had our first dinner in the UK. Afterward, Concetta said, "what kind of soup do you suppose that was?"

"I can't place the taste," I said, "but it was green and it was hot."