Escapes and Escapades

scotlandAbout a week ago, a friend and I decided to go on a trip. We talked it over, and agreed that we wanted to get as far away from Paris as possible, spending the least amount of money possible, and to get there and back in three days. On Wednesday night, we sat down at our computers, and spent hours researching and booking tickets. By the end of the night, we had booked a series of plane, train, and bus tickets, and reserved places at three different hostels. We were leaving the next day.
After dinner on Thursday, we met up at Porte Maillot, a metro stop in the sixteenth arrondissement, and took a shuttle to a regional airport. From there, we hopped onto a plane that got us to Glasgow in an hour and a half. At Glasgow, we took a shuttle from the airport into town, and caught a taxi at the bus station, which took us to our hostel in the west end of Glasgow. By this time it was about one in the morning; I had been traveling for about six hours, and had spent just under a hundred euros…and we had only just gotten started.
The next morning, we woke up at six am (mistakenly: we had forgotten to turn back our watches, and believed it to be seven) and took another cab to the Glasgow central train station. Discovering our error, we settled in for a two hour wait, but eventually boarded our train around eight. This train, called the West Highland Railway, would take us from Glasgow into the upper reaches of the Scottish Highlands. The route was famous for its views, and the four and a half hour train ride gave us plenty of time to admire them. Our train ride ended at Fort William, where we disembarked, finding ourselves in the middle of a quiet Scottish town. We found our way to the supermarket, buying some food for the road before heading out. Neither of us was dressed appropriately, or had any of the standard gear for an adventure like this. This didn’t worry me at all, but my friend wanted to buy a backpack, so we walked over to a hunting and camping store and picked the cheapest we could find. While making our purchase, we asked for directions to the hostel where we would be staying the night. It was literally in the middle of nowhere, at the foot of Ben-Nevis, the tallest mountain in the United Kingdom. The way was easy enough, however, and we set off down the road. The air was crisp and we were struck by the sounds and smells of the country around us: less than twenty four hours before, we had been in Paris, and now we were more or less off of the map, with only the vaguest idea of where we were or where we were going. The walk was nice and we stopped in a graveyard to take shelter from a sudden rain shower. We didn’t have to wait long for it to pass, and when it did we were rewarded by a rainbow, our second of the day. Finally we got to the hostel, a small sort of cottage in the foothills, and after checking in, promptly passed out. We were exhausted, but we had made it!
The trip continued for the next two days very much in this vein. The weather was dramatic, so windy that we were getting blown over, and often rainy. We braved the weather to stroll around and over the hills, meeting the local sheep and taking in the views. We spent the nights eating at an inn nearby, apparently the only hang out spot for miles, and meeting the locals. On Sunday, we woke up early, and repeated in reverse Friday’s route out.
The trip was fantastic, for several reasons and on several different levels. It felt wonderful to be deep in nature, and in the middle of such a drastically different cultural setting. Mostly though, the trip was an exercise in possibilities. We had booked everything the night before, and were more than a little surprised to find how easy it felt, and how successful our trip was. It really went flawlessly, and our sense of adventure was heightened by a sort of mental jet-lag--our travel hadn’t caught up to us yet, and we still felt ourselves to be in Paris. I was blown away by how easy this all was, and the larger implications of our success; if we could pull this trip off, we could do it again. Suddenly, the whole of Europe was open to us, in a way that I hadn’t really believed was possible. The plane ride back was spent brain-storming for our next adventure, and when I walked through my front door at eight o’clock on Sunday, the first thing I did was sit down at my computer and look up flights going out of Paris.