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.
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