A Visit from the McCabes

This week was a bit busier than usual because David McCabe and Franny Lucey McCabe were visiting from Colgate. They had been in St. Andrews five years ago, so had a list of things they wanted to do from their first time here. At the top of Franny’s list was a visit to Tentsmuir Point Nature Reserve. This reserve is on the southern shore of the Firth of Tay—a large finger of land that juts eastward into the ocean, and is growing larger every year. It’s full of sand dunes and grassy marshes, and though it’s the home of seaducks and seals, it’s such a large plot of land that one has to hike quite far up the shoreline to find any wildlife. We headed up

there on a sunny afterschool afternoon, and once the kids caught site of the dunes and the huge, wide-open beach full of animal tracks, they were content to stay right there, and venture no further north. We were there for almost two hours, and our visit followed the usual pattern: the kids run to the ocean, write their names as large as possible in the sand, debate who stepped on who’s name for a bit, then John starts to chase birds while Emma performs various twirls towards the water, then one of them gets too far out towards the oceanand suddenly has a bootful of cold water, and we all pack it in, head to the car, and have digestives and hot tea!

We also went to Edinburgh with Franny on Friday. We took the train down in the morning, and David and I took the kids to Our Dynamic Earth, which is an earth science center at the foot of Arthur’s Seat and the Royal Mile in the center of the city. It’s a very well done museum, though a visit is highly orchestrated by various tour guides who become part of a “time machine”

storyline and usher guests from one room of the museum to the next in small groups. The first few rooms are separate theaters complete with 360 degree panoramic aerial shots, shaking floors and fog machines that are supposed to make you feel as if your time machine has just flown into the crater of a volcano or around the melting edge of a glacier. John absolutely loved it, but Emma and Franny are just a bit too old to buy into it, and I caught them snickering and rolling their eyes a few times as the tour guide excitedly proclaimed that we were now 15,000 million years back in time. Even David was prepared to challenge the whole theme: when we first entered, he leaned over to the guide and said, “So, don’t you think that if time travel was REALLY ever possible, we would have been visited by someone from the future by now?” The guide quickly dropped his Disney-esque demeanor and admitted, “Yes, probably…” Fortunately, John had moved ahead to the earthquake simulation display and didn’t hear the exchange.

Since this was our second visit to Edinburgh, I felt almost like a local as I guided our group from the train station through the winding “closes” of Old Town and down the Royal Mile toward the Scottish Parliament and Holyrood Palace on the way to the museum. So, I was quite surprised when we first arrived, and the tour guide asked us if this was our first time. When I said “yes” (just that…one word….) she smiled and said, “Oh, well I guess so…I can tell by the accent then!” I was thrown by this, as I have spent a good deal of time thinking about the Scottish accent and analyzing specific consonant sounds that are different from ours. For example, I know that the Scots roll their r, drop their t, and make their d sound almost like a j (at church, the preacher often uses the word “duly,” but in his accent it sounds a lot like my name, which is especially jarring…). But I still can’t figure out how the word “yes” in a Scottish accent is different enough from “yes” in an American accent to identify my nationality upon opening my mouth!

After the museum, we had lunch at a pub on the Royal Mile called the White Horse, which the proprietor insisted was the oldest bar in Edinburgh. I’m not sure about that, but it certainly was one of the smallest, and seemed to be the kind of place that doesn’t worry too much about attracting the steady stream of visitors walking down Canongate on their way from the castle to the palace. We all sat in the back room which was once a stable, according to our waitress, who spent about 20 minutes talking with us about her upcoming wedding and her two year old daughter Scarlett who was at her side—an unusually straight-faced kid with a shock of curly red hair and nothing to say (likely because she had never been able to get a word in amidst her mother’s steady chatter…). The food was great, though—David had the haggis, which he hid from vegetarian Emma behind a large candle in the middle of the table, and I had a mezze plate of hummus, olives and tapenade with pitta bread (they spell it with two ts here but don’t pronounce either, strangely…) After lunch, we walked to New Town, and took the kids to a playground in the Princes Street garden, which is at the foot of Edinburgh castle. We stayed there until John got too hungry to continue, then we walked to the shopping district where we bought him some snacks at a Sainsburys. This worked, and gave us time to walk through the streets of New Town, which are full of high end department stores and pubs, and lined with performers juggling fire and playing Led Zeppelin on acoustic guitar. The shops started to close at six, and our train was scheduled to depart at 6:30, so we walked back to the station and waited. David and David McCabe engaged a local in a conversation about how to pronounce the nearby town “Anstruther,” and then there was an incident involving the train tracks and John’s brand new Scotland rugby ball, which John has forbade me from ever telling. It does end well, though, so we all returned to St. Andrews safe and sound, with John’s rugby ball safely tucked under his arm.