Ouch...

Rated "PG-13" for violence and drunken behavior.

Man, we are no good at going to bed early - even when we know the consequences will be enormous. Sunday night in Edinburgh, our last night in Edinburgh, was supposed to be low key so we could get up early and get our car and get the hell out of Dodge. We all agreed. Dinner, 1-2 drinks and then bed. Not even close. We had dinner at, hell I can't even remember. Doesn't matter. What does matter is we had one bottle of wine with said dinner then decided to go back to our hostel and have one more at a small cafe right next door since they had out door seating. After the 2nd bottle we decided to find a place still open and I have just one last drink. The Irish blood took over from there and the prospect of VERY cheep wine (we were drinking blush by the end of the night people) and laughing was just too good to pass up. None of us have a full recollection of that night or how much we ended up drinking (conservative estimates are 8 bottles total) other than we know we drunk dialed Mom and Dad 3 times because we kept getting into fights in the phone booth. Mom and Dad would hear things like "yeah, it's been pretty cold here but yesterday...Stop it Matt. Shut it! No you shut it! GRRGGAAHHHA...click" Then we'd dial back and explain that Matt's head clicked the receiver when we were bashing it against the phone booth.

We woke the next morning with bruised/bloody knuckles and one of the top 5 hangovers I've ever had. Truly hating life that morning. We slept about 1.5 hrs past the alarm (we were all still pretty drunk at 8am when it went off) before finally catching a cab and getting to the rental car place. Luckily, they didn't have our car ready so Paul and I walked down to get breakfast for the 3 of us and tried to sober up. Matt and I had tea - Paul had coffee. Remember that detail for later.

We got a VW Golf and piled in. Anyone who knows us, knows we all have different rolls when we travel. Paul does math, conversions and poor accents/imitations. Matt asks questions Paul nor I want to and is a pretty good punch line. I drive, mandate eating times and encourage/facilitate most of the drinking binges we've been on.

So, with me behind the wheel finally, we head out of Edinburgh to Oban (pronounced Oh-bin). It's a 3.25hr drive. We made it in 2.5hrs and that's counting the times we had to pull over for Paul to feel better and blow chunks (see, I told you to remember he had coffee). We told him coffee was a bad idea. We got to Oban and found a GREAT B&B who's run by a woman to would be any of our grandmothers if she was 60, Scottish, a golfer, listened to Amy Winehouse and a mother of 5 boys! As you can guess, we were a big hit. When she said she only had a room with a double and a single bed, I told her that would be fine, we're brothers and we'd done it before. She said "aye and with no wee bit of fist-a-cuffs between the lot of you I'm sure".

We had some seafood down at the pier (lobster sandwiches, crayfish and salmon steaks) before heading to the scotch whiskey distillery. Had a great tour there and learned a ton about the six regions of Scotch (much like the wine regions of France...only cooler and not as snotty). I bought some stuff that'll keep you warm on a February night. It will also make you blind if you drink it too fast. We learned some really cool tricks about adding water to scotch, an act of heresy I had thought.

We then had dinner on the pier again, different restaurants and had the best muscles I've ever had in my life and I order them on any menu I see, anytime I come over. The were "rope grow" in the loch about a mile up so they grow very fast and are very tender. amazing. We split our plates of haddock, salmon and seafood pasta and walked away full. Even managed to convince Paul that we should have a bottle of wine.

This time, we really did go to bed at a decent hour. After dinner we headed back to and arcade and shot a round billiards before walking back to the B&B to read and sleep. With the 1st full 8 hrs under our belts we woke this morning to an "English breakfast". If you don't know what that is, consider yourself lucky. Eggs, French toast, toast, bacon, bangers, hash browns, cereal, orange juice, tea and pancakes make for a full meal. I'm pretty sure our host would have stood over us until we finished our juice if we hadn't already.

We're off to Fort Williams this morning, overnighting in Pitlochry. We'll see Loch Ness on the way.

A note for the terrorists

Rated "R" for language and extreme nationalistic/narrow minded viewsOk, so all these bombings and terrorist attacks over here just have me baffled. Of all the people in the world, not of fuck with - the Scots need to go ahead and be at the top of that list. The bombers (all originating from where you'd expect) should do a little history check. The English, OK - risky but you know what, roll the dice and see how you come out. The Scots on the other hand...I think they'd just not been here before. The Scots have been fighting the English more than a few 100 years and it looks like they'll be doing it for a few 100 more. In fact, in effort to help educate our Middle Eastern friends, I've compiled this list of people NOT to fuck with.

1 - The Australians. I shouldn't have to explain this one but I will. They're all big blokes who are decedents of murderers, thieves and some other horrible shit. It was a prison colony. So you have a few hundred years of selective breeding going on there. Chance of being beaten senseless by your own boots if you fuck with them? 9/10

2 - The Scots/Irish. There's no real point in distinguishing between the 2 but I'll give the upper hand to the Scots on this one as they are bigger in size. They have games like caber (sp?) tossing where the basically see how far they can throw telephone polls. They also like bolder tossing or anything where the objective is to throw something twice as large as yourself. Chance of being crushed by a 4-ton bolder if you fuck with them? 8/10

3 - The Americans. Once again, selective breeding helps here. We were the ballsy ones who decided fighting Indians and starvation were viable options. We have more nukes than anyone and a military budget 10 times the size of the next biggest. Our only real weakness is we may have an incompetent, semi retarded half-wit in the white house when you attack us (Bush, Jr). We'll get confused and bomb another country and not yours. Chance of being bombed back into the stone age? 7/10

4 - Everyone else. Yeah, everyone else has their claim to fame. The Italians have their Costa Nostra, the Asians have their land wars, the French have their cheese. But they all have fatal flaws when it comes to really kicking ass. The Italians have to look good doing it, they Asians need to feed their people and the French have to constantly deal with the fact that they are indeed French. Chance of being slapped by a white glove if you fuck with them, 4/10So take note, terrorist man and heed this list.

We're fine

Rated "PG" for discussion of potentially violent themes and adult situations

For those of you wondering, we're OK. The Glasgow bombing and the London attempts have made things a little more difficult for us though. We went back to the airport today to get our car to go to St. Andrews, only to find the police weren't letting any in or out, only taxis and buses. A taxi ride to the course would have been £100 and that wasn't in the budget.

We came back and did some...ok A LOT of shopping on Prince St. All of us got a ton of stuff. I even found one for those golfing hat that fits me and a corduroy jacket so I fit right in. I even got a pair of those shoes....ok, this I getting self deprecating. Suffice to say, I got a bunch of cool stuff. I even managed to get Paul to go out on a limb with some Euro fashion. Oh, and there was this AWESOME open air market that had samples just like Central Market back home, only much better. Plus they didn't scowl nearly as much as they do state side when you take a full handful of cheese, right Dad?

Matt was spent after that so he went back to the hostel and caught some zzzz's while Paul and I saw ocean's 13. We just finished buying souvenirs for people and are about to have Thai food, again. Gota love it.

a bloody good time!

Rated "PG-13", for bathroom humor (including dick and fart jokes), shameless self promotion and bawdy behavior

Where to start, where to start...? After I posted my last blog we went back to the hostel to get a few things for tonight and get ready. Matt took the opportunity to explain to the receptionist (male) that tomorrow we'd be playing a round at St. Andrews and we'd be sore that afternoon and did the man know of (using exact language here) "a good massage parlor [he] and [his] brothers could relax". The man looked very nervous and waited for Matt to say something that would make the situation less awkward. Matt, not realizing the international beard for brothel was "massage parlor" (naive or stupid, you tell me), just blinked and the guy waited for the reply. The bloke finally stumbled out something to the like of never having been to one himself but his friends had. The phone then rang and he was all to relieved to be able to answer it.

We broke Matt's balls for the next two hrs over dinner where we had great house beer (where they really pull it from the kegs, not the pressurized crap we use...I guess technically it's all pressurized but you know what I mean) and haggis - delicious. I'm not just saying that because I was three sheets to the wind, I really love the stuff. For those of you curious, haggis is barley, and goat organs (they're never more specific than that) in goat intestine. I bet your mouth is already watering.

We knew we had to be up early the next morning for golf so we decided to head to Finnegan's early and finish early. Well, we got half that right. Apparently ALL of the single women were getting married the next day which meant everyone was out on a hen party (bachelorette party). As soon as we're in the bar one of the brides-to-be comes up holding a card that she explains requires her "to squeeze hunks arse". We couldn't have scripted it any better if we had rehearsed. O course, all the bridesmaids are watching so we have an audience, and how do you expect us to walk away from that. In unison, we look at on another, shrug, take a drink of our beers, turn around put our hands on the bar and say, "if you're gonna grab one darlin' you'd better go ahead and get your money's worth". We each get a honk, take the picture and go about our business. The band kicked ass again and we stuck around until around 11pm or so until it was too crowded.

We walked down the street a wee bit to a place matt and I spied when we were out for pizza. We pop in for a pint but the place was unhinged. We were sucked in to the dance floor and it was at that moment, Matt nearly cause an international incident by dancing to Shakira. Holy shit that was funny! I would have given my left arm for a video camera. We were having such a good time we were all surprise when Paul announce that it was 12:30 and we needed to have his ass in bed soon or he was gonna be shite on the course. I think it was just a good excuse for him to suck today but we followed him out and announce it to be a raging success.