November 30th was St Andrew’s day, so Rebecca and I decided to take a train trip up to St. Andrew’s for a little ‘get-away’—it was honestly one of the best days I’ve had in weeks!
The majority of the reason for the trip was to visit a friend of a friend—one of my sorority sisters, Colleen Castle, sent me an email in the beginning of the year letting me know she had a good friend studying at St. Andrew’s University, Judd Kennedy, and gave me his contact information to get in touch with him. It took me about a month to contact him—and then another month to actually plan a trip to visit him. It was another one of those ‘pull out my calendar, pick a day, and officially pencil it in’ type trips—because otherwise I knew I wouldn’t do it!!
Rebecca Manias came with me—and I couldn’t have had a better traveling buddy!! We took the train from Edinburgh at 1130am and arrived roughly an hour later at St. Andrew’s. It wasn’t exactly what we were expecting…essentially, it’s a town with three streets!! Much MUCH smaller than Edinburgh (and this is still quite the understatement). We met Judd at the bus station (St. Andrew’s is so small they don’t have their own train station—we had to take the train into Leuchar’s—or as Rebecca calls it ‘Ludacris’—and then bus it in to the city centre). Then we embarked on our afternoon!
The weather was spectacular (minus the fact that it had to have been below freezing with a biting wind). We visited the ruins of the old cathedral and the castle. We went down in one of the mines under the castle ruins, which involved a 3 foot high tunnel, filled with creepy orange slugs and a dripping slimy liquid. Now, this is hard to navigate without touching the walls, especially if you’re almost 6 feet tall in 3-inch heeled knee boots. You will all be relieved to know I managed along well—but take a good look at the pictures and you’ll see I wasn’t exaggerating!
One thing I noticed that was a bit odd was the excessive amount of wells throughout the city…note the picture of me ‘falling into one’ ☺ All of them were covered, so I suppose one couldn’t literally fall in…but I wondered what it would have been like 300 years ago and if perhaps people fell in then every once and a while…or maybe thrown in for punishment?!
We had dinner at a little Indian restaurant in the heart of town and mini Becks and I caught the 830pm train back (by the grace of God might I add!!) We were running late—aka, we took a cab at 8:23pm from the city centre to catch the 830pm train—not a brilliant move on our part. When we go there, we were sure we had missed the train, until we were informed that train was running 14 minutes late!!! Conclusion: we caught the train right in the nick of time, picked up some M&S mousse upon arrival back at Waverly station, and called it a fantastic day!!
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