There is a problem with relying on the Last In First Out process to select the first KITCHEN boxes from my storage unit for my move to Oregon. I assumed that the boxes in front contained the essentials needed for a rudimentary beginning in my new apartment. So I ended up with a pasta wheel and no table knives. I have a shortbread mold, but no mixing bowls. And when my son and his girlfriend came to visit and wanted to make dinner, we realized there was no can opener in the three drawers filled with kitchen utensils. A minor problem, for sure, solved with a beer can opener, but I wanted my can opener. Opening those boxes was like peering into a time capsule. What did that previous person think was important for her future?

There are many factors in deciding where to live when the world opens up without issues like a job offer or a spouse. In theory, this seems like an ideal situation. Yet, having too many choices and a mind content to weigh every possibility marred my thinking. My list of where I would not live grew and my list of preferred places changed daily. I realized that two things hampered my decision. First, I had to allow myself to make a mistake. If it doesn’t work here, I’ll move on. The second, and most stalling problem, was the storage unit in Utah. How I would move my possessions stymied my decision. It is expensive to move furniture and it is expensive and silly to keep up a storage unit. It is time to Feng Shui my life, because my stuff is in the way. There aren’t many things I want from my old life. Much of it makes me sad and keeps me from beginning again. Anything of emotional value to me will fit in my car. Living out of a suitcase for a year prepared me for this moment of downsizing. The year of traveling also prepared me for making the intuitive decision to settle on the coast with the Columbia River in my backyard and the ocean beaches just down the road on Highway 101.

My backyard is where the California sea lions come to do whatever sea lions do for a few months of the year. Hundreds of them. Sometimes around 1600 plus. Their barking is constant and much louder than the highway noise near my apartment building. Every night I go to sleep to the roar of sea lions and I love it. I guess it’s my version of katydids or crickets on a summer night. Sea lions are new to me. Anything maritime, from the Coast Guard base nearby to the weird array of beards I encounter daily, is exotic and as foreign to me as anywhere I visited in Europe. The cable guy told me he used to be a rougher. What exactly is a rougher? I now live in an earthquake zone, but also a known tsunami area. Salt Lake City, Utah has an annual rainfall of 13 inches a year. Rain comes down in feet here. Sometimes it can rain for a month straight. This is Lewis and Clark territory. It will take years for me to learn the history of the area. I don’t have to calculate sales tax anymore. I’m going to have to exchange my snow boots for rain boots and my winter coat for a good rain slicker. Luckily sweaters have always been a summer staple for me, so no problems there!

Every walk I take introduces me to something worth studying. But how long before it becomes mundane? Will I cease shopping local and head for Portland every week to visit Whole Foods or Powell’s Books? At what point will I begin to complain about the ten thousand summer tourists and the congestion on the highways? How long will it take for me to wake up one morning and say, “I wish those (fill in expletive here) sea lions would shut up!”?

How long before I look at my new can opener and decide it is too worn or useless to keep anymore?

This morning I awoke with a cat on my face. Her fish breath gagged me and overpowered the fresh morning air. Her amber eyes focused on my hair, before she leaned in to chew my bangs. For some reason this cat loves humans, greeting us at the door with as much excitement as a cat can convey – in other words, a miniscule bit of attention. It’s a ruse. She loves us for our hair. It is a mystery why this cat isn’t riddled with gigantic, throat-consuming hairballs. Regardless of her hair-fetish, the cat represents the problems of returning to one’s past. I’ll explain as soon as I quit sneezing.

My childhood is marked by a succession of cats. First there was Toughy, my brother’s Christmas present. Toughy was grey and white-striped and lived up to his name. Un-neutered and always ready for a fight, he lived for a very long time where his longevity was marked by a missing tooth or claw, holes in his ears, and bare patches from his amorous pursuits. Next came Taffy, a lovely cat with no fear and great acrobatic qualities. Her most stupendous feat of daring involved her insistence that she could catch huge geese. We often saw her orange body flying above the grass in the neighboring field as she defied gravity while clamped onto the foot of an airborne goose. But Tyler understood about coming back home. He was a stray (as most of them were). After a couple of years, he ran away from home. Every Thanksgiving, Tyler showed up at the door, walked in like he’d never left and kicked the current permanent resident off its place on the couch. Tyler stayed through the middle of January and then he disappeared until the next year.

It is true that you can’t go home again. Main Street looks the same, minus the train station. My mother’s house has a few improvements, yet it hasn’t altered all that much in 40 years. Even though my father and older brother are dead and my mother is older, there is much here that hasn’t changed. Emotions I’d forgotten about come back in the form of vague feelings of uneasiness. I remember this house as a refuge from the insecurities of my Junior High and High School years. In some ways the only thing that has changed is the cat. Yet, the new cat means everything in this experience. The cat isn’t the same and neither am I.

Perceptions of our childhood guide our reactions to coming home. We all know the high school jock or cheerleader who continues to rule the halls of their high school into adulthood. I am always flummoxed by those people in my life who speak about their childhood, especially their High School and University experiences, as something extraordinary. They search for old classmates on Facebook and connect with people they didn’t think of for decades, falling back into childhood friendships. It seems so odd that out of a lifetime of 60 years, others choose to believe the three or four years of high school (or Junior High or college) were the best years of their lives. Those years marked the most isolating times of my life – more opportunities to not fit into the social groups. I don’t ever want to go back to High School.

There are many advantages to a small town, but a person can be marked or labeled from the first grade on. It isn’t easy to escape your fate, especially if you are shy and a bit naïve about life. Having four brothers and a cop for a father didn’t help much either. I was one of those girls that circled the edge of all the groups. Always invited to parties, I was accepted without being popular. I sang in the choir, played my flute in the band, and even served as the editor of the high school paper. But I don’t remember those years fondly.

HOWEVER easy it is to belittle the high school heroes that haven’t moved on, I am faced with another question. What if my memories of my own angst-filled existence are similar to the former kings and queens’ delusions of grandeur? I’m finding out that maybe the story I’ve written about my own life as an outcast is perhaps just as distorted as the stories told by others who saw their young lives as glittering. I have the advantage here. I’m the new girl in town. People can guess my identity because they know I’m back; they remember me because I answer my mother’s door. Yet I feel guilty for not remembering these people from my past. The most disturbing part is that, just like the cheerleaders, I’m judging people from their actions as children. I met someone just today, a man who I’m sure never knew I existed through most of our school years together. I would never have guessed the man outside the door was that same boy. He was personable and accommodating and complimentary. When I told my mother that an incident in fourth grade was the way I always remembered this man, she told me he would be mortified to know that is his legacy in my mind.

I’m mortified I cannot remember my classmates. I am ashamed I have chosen to lock them in the prison of adolescence and deny them parole, even as they grew into parents and grandparents and experienced both joy and tragedy in their lives. I’m ashamed that I never knew I was considered one of the older unapproachable girls that boys in the class behind me wanted to date. My determination to be an outcast makes me realize I was just as guilty as my seemingly successful peers. I’ve focused so much of my adulthood on proving that I’m better than those I perceived as looking past me.

This place isn’t for me. Even with my awakenings in the forms of a new cat and the end of my long-held perceptions of my childhood, I know I must move on. My life isn’t in the past. But that doesn’t mean I can’t invite people from my past back into my life. The key is to accept or reject them as they are now. Everyone is a product of their experiences and their capacity to learn from errors in judgment. If they are willing to forgive, I can return the favor.

But the cat stays here.

My friends watched me as they listened for the train we had rushed to catch. My uncertainty about my future hit me as I stood facing an already open turnstile in the BART station, wondering if I needed to put my ticket in before walking through it. (The answer is yes, of course, otherwise it messes the ticket up for the exit). At that moment, I was incapable of making any more decisions. Clearly, my friends wondered how I managed to travel through Europe for six months if I could not master BART.

Decisiveness has never been a strength in my personality. In Europe, though, I encountered very little hesitation in my actions. I made quick decisions as I ran for trains when their destinations were unclear. I picked restaurants without analyzing the menus to exhaustion. I took chances and allowed myself to get lost. And most times, even bad decisions worked themselves out to be good decisions. There are two reasons for the purposeful life I led in England. First, I had no travel companion with whom to banter about choices. The second reason had to do with a dream about sparkly, blue flowers on rectangle trees.

Dreams are a useful way for me to work out problems, though I am a bit worried about the dream where I was literally cleaning out Nixon’s kitchen cabinet. I can reproduce detailed descriptions of dreams I had in childhood, like one that involved a whole War of the Worlds scenario and another where I saw Lincoln’s face in my bedroom window. (The penchant for American Presidents is a bit disturbing.) As the trip came together and as I closed up my apartment and quit my job, I began to wonder about doing something so out of character that even many family members and friends did not think I would actually go through with it. I suspect I thought at some level that I would change my mind. About a month before I left, I sorted it out with a dream.

In the dream I was trying to get to a familiar place, but the path was blocked by an immense black hole. There were bushes overgrowing the path around the hole, making it very dangerous to navigate the hole and get to my destination. I decided to change my route, knowing that I would find my way around the abyss and be back in a comfortable place again. Only I did not know where the detour would take me. I followed my bliss by taking Robert Frost’s less-traveled road. That is where I found the rectangle trees dropping blue flowers onto the road. People stopped on the sidewalk and danced in the flowers with me. I watched as the petals fell on me like glitter off a Christmas card. When I woke from the dream, I had no doubts. Thank goodness for that dream. It helped me understand that not all obstacles are permanent impediments. It is possible to get to a desired place in life, even when a black hole blocks the way.

I’m in Nevada now, stopped on my way back to Idaho from another stay in California. I am so lucky to have my loved ones back in my life. I have many people to care for, but there are also many people that want to bring me into their lives, to include me in their homes and activities, and to introduce me to ready-made friends. It is a privilege to be needed – to make a difference in the lives of others. Before I took my amazing journey, I planned to decide on my life’s next destination before I came home. It hasn’t quite worked out as I planned. There are delays in making that decision, as well as less certainty about how I will get to my dream place. I must decide not to decide. Maybe the original detour in my life’s journey was necessary, making it possible for me to be in this place at this time. I wrote about looking for yellow butterflies and searching for pink shirts. Now, I need to trust that I will experience the blue flowers and rectangular trees on my life’s updated route.

Thank you, all my friends and readers, for following my blog and posting comments. Even though I decided to keep the later comments private, I did read them and I appreciate the support you gave me. Your support reinforced my belief that my life is truly blessed. I will continue with my blog, but my focus will change, now that I’m back in the USA. I hope you will continue to read and make comments. And I wish that you all will get to see the blue flowers of your dreams.

The moment I stepped off the British Airways plane and walked into the San Francisco terminal was the moment I severed my last connection to the United Kingdom. It was a bitter-sweet moment. I loved the UK. Returning home was self-imposed, because I missed my family and friends. Also, my return home involved the UK’s hospitality – it welcomed me for six months, no more. It is remarkable how much I noticed about my home country, once I re-established my American life.

The best thing, of course, was reuniting with my children. The second-best thing? Drip coffee. This is not a complaint about the café press. I adore coffee from a press, but I do not adore cleaning it. And I’m right in there with the espresso crowd. Yet it’s easy to understand why instant coffee is a hit in the UK. It’s a quick dose of caffeine in the morning. The wonderful thing about drip coffee is that I can make a pot and leave it to simmer into a tar-like substance for much of the day. It sounds terrible, but I learned to drink strong, sludgy coffee when I visited sheepherders with my Deputy Sheriff dad. Sludge tastes like home.

I cannot seem to get enough American Mexican food. Tacos, burritos, enchiladas, and refried beans did not taste the same in England. Or pancakes or turkey…

One unexpected pleasure is the view of the San Francisco bay from my daughter’s home. Watching the fog roll in at night as it extinguishes city lights is better than any television. When the fog rolls back in the morning, so much is revealed, from the deer standing near the front window to the two bridges that define the bay – the grand white girders of the new Bay Bridge and the familiar reddish-orange of the Golden Gate Bridge. On a clear morning, the sun reflects off the water of the bay and the skyscrapers emerge from the haze.

I found it a bit difficult to get financing for a new car when I have no real home and I was out of the country for six months. Really! Do I look like a flight risk? Excellent credit and a helpful car salesman soon solved the problem. I am now a proud member of the American driving public. I also put 1000 miles on my new odometer, within one week of purchasing my car, with a drive across Nevada to Idaho. Trust me. I’m not on the run. The State of California and my bank can find me in that little Hole in the Wall.

The drive reminded me of the country I left behind and how, in one 10-hour day, I can drive through the Sierras with their massive pines and icy blue mountain lakes, only to descend into the flat, lonely desert of Nevada. Some observations from my drive:

• Is it better to stop at the only rest stop in a couple of hundred miles, when it is located off the road a mile into the trees and risk either Sasquatch or the Unabomber or is it better to hold it and risk some horrible urinary consequence?
• Rattlesnakes at rest stops. No explanation needed.
• Sometimes the most interesting thing was when I met up with a car whose cruise control was set just a tiny bit lower than mine and it took half an hour to pass it. Who flinches first and alters the cruise control speed to stop the standoff?
• Reading the owner manual of a new car while driving 80 miles per hour is never a good idea.
• I’m not a fan of the desert, but there is a subtle beauty in the desert in the fall. I noticed the colors looked like layers of decorative sand placed in a jar. First the layer of black asphalt that blended into the red fire bush alongside the road. The fire bush melded into the blooming yellow-topped, dusty-green sagebrush. Beyond the black, red, yellow, and green swirled intricate shades of beige sand, scattered with dots of black pines. Now if there could just be the white concrete of a rest stop in the tableau…
• No matter how many radio stations across Nevada are dedicated to Country Western, I still don’t like it.
• The boredom of the drive is somewhat alleviated by allotting two Pretzel M&M pieces for every five miles driven.

I arrived in Wendover (a town divided between non-gambling Utah and gambling Nevada) about dusk. An unusual amount of rain had fallen earlier in the week, covering the normal, compacted, snow-colored salt flats with standing water and with the lowering sun, it looked like a gigantic blue-water oasis in the middle of the desert. In all my years in Utah I’ve missed that view of the Salt Flats. However, the monotony of the drive hasn’t changed and I rejoiced when the unmistakable stink of decaying brine shrimp preceded my arrival at the Great Salt Lake.

I’m in the mountains of Idaho right now. I’ve returned to my small hometown for a bit. There are pickup trucks with gun racks in their cabs and antlers in their beds. The diner is filled with cowboy hats and boots and deer hunters in camouflage. Most people live within an easy walking distance of the main street and grocery, but everyone drives. I remember that hiking from sea level is a lot easier than from beginning at a mile high. Freight trains roll through the town every night and their whistles comfort me just as they did in my childhood. And last week, I experienced thunder snow for the first time in a while.

I remember why I couldn’t stay here and I’m anxious to begin my life again, but in many ways I’ve come full circle. The spires of Oxford seem so distant from my life now. I’m seventeen again – bursting to escape. As George Bailey said in It’s A Wonderful Life, “I’m shakin’ the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world.”

I’ve seen some more of the world and once again, my life is ahead of me.

But it’s nice to be back home in the USA.

Recently I read an article in The New York Times addressing the ramifications of the ease of digital photography and our need to record and distribute our every move with selfies.** The author, Alex Williams, wondered if we are becoming a world of narcissists missing out on the pleasures of being attentive to our surroundings. He asks if it is better “to live for the moment or record it?”

The fact that I am repeating this question in an over-used form of self-absorption, a blog about my travels and experiences, is the ultimate hypocrisy. My justifications are that this blog is a way for my family and friends to keep track of me, to share my experiences in somewhat real time versus a lengthy slideshow later, to let them know where I am in case I go missing, and to make up for all those phone calls and texts that are too expensive when using international data plans. The photos (admittedly some in the selfie category) are to enhance the blog and show them I am more than all right. Where this logic fails is in my constant perusal of the website statistics. I question why there are no visitors on a certain day or what countries are represented by my visitors. Maybe I should tag my blog posts to gain a higher readership. It seems that I need validation from others. How is this different from posting my mug on Facebook daily or tweeting my every thought before it escapes my limited brain capacity or recording all the cute antics of my grandchild? The sad truth is that it isn’t much different, but I do have an opinion (which I freely share) on the recording of life’s every moment on a digital device. Our obsession with social media is overkill.

Overkill happens when we spend more time composing a photo to post on Facebook, than we do enjoying our location or the event we are recording. This is a personal decision and it depends on the circumstances. But what if we miss the big event because we are focused through a camera lens?

But recording and posting is more than overkill, it can be personally intrusive to those people in our social and family circles who do not wish to be immortalized in a viral video. On Facebook, we have the ability to turn off anything we don’t want to see or we can de-friend someone. We do not have to follow anyone on Twitter. So I honestly don’t care how many selfies someone takes or how many updates they make to their status. I’m in control of what I see and don’t see. In many ways this is preferable to being in a room with a slide projector viewing pictures of someone’s vacation. I can sort through the pictures and view what interests me. And it is always fun to keep track of my family and friends. Mostly I like the freedom of digital communication.

It becomes a problem, though, when pictures are posted for our friends and then sent to their friends. Do we have the right to spread something beyond the original circle of friends? I don’t think we do have that right. Here’s an example. When my son was a toddler, we shot a video of him that seems quite funny and harmless. Sometimes we tease him about bringing out that video. He does not want us to show anyone that video, even though he is an adult now. It makes him uncomfortable. It wasn’t until I thought about the ramifications of children’s cute videos going “viral” that I began to understand. What right do we have to post something without the subject’s consent? Why is it deemed okay for a parent to post a funny incident that might not be funny to the child later on? Just because we can access something in digital form, like the celebrity nude photos, it is still private. Accessing someone’s cloud account and sneaking into someone’s home to find a compromising photo are the same thing.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t send videos of our children to grandparents and family members. What I am saying is that we need to think about what we are doing before we post it to a Facebook account or other social media sites. How many of those friends are really friends? Nobody can be sure that a picture or thought will not be shared with a friend’s friends. I’m just as guilty as others, because I have posted pictures on Facebook of family members and friends without asking permission. I don’t tag them and most of the pictures are benign. Most of the people in the photos I posted are active Facebook participants and don’t care. Some are in public settings and part of a crowd scene which, I believe, is fair game. But not all of them are consensual. Now, I’m more aware of the consequences to other people if I post something without thinking of their sensibilities or wishes. Maybe that cute kid making a silly remark will not find it funny later on.

Some commenters from the online version of The New York Times article brought up some other points — like the intrusion on someone else’s experience when phones and iPads are blocking the view or when performers cannot see their audience because of the camera flashes. There are reasons that photography is restricted in some venues and why funerals often need to be phone-free. Many people disagree with my reasoning, but at life-changing events, I believe it is important to consider those people who want to remember their experience without the backdrop of phones and video cameras. Maybe those gatherings need the professional who knows how to record the day without intruding too much on the celebration or memorial. Digital photography continues to improve and makes better picture-takers out of the amateur photographer. How we use it is certainly an individual decision, because we all have different needs when it comes to the special times in our lives.

I found that at the end of my trip, I tended to leave my camera behind and I focused on the experience, letting it unfold as I wandered about my new surroundings. For the wonders of my world, I knew I can find a better photo  on the internet than I can take. I realized I don’t need to prove I was there, even though I continue to share my experiences on my blog. A woman I met in Edinburgh told me of her aunt, who at the age of sixty, decided to take sixty photos of sixty new people in sixty new places. She wanted to record the faces and stories of people she met in her journeys, rather than recreate the same holiday photos of major attractions. It is the people I’ll remember from my travels and I’m sorry I didn’t ask many of them for permission to take a photo, because they are the grand experiences in my life. They are the wonders I want to remember.

** Williams, Alex. “A Defining Question in an i-Phone Age: Live for the Moment or Record It?, The New York Times; September 26, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/fashion/a-defining-question-in-an-iphone-age-live-for-the-moment-or-record-it.html?_r=1

Like those seagulls in Dover, uneasiness follows me and deftly closes in on my conscience. It’s time to apologize to the White Cliffs. Now that there is recent footage of a ghost in Dover Castle (search for Dover Castle ghost 2014), I am compelled to share my own experience at the castle, as well as to talk about the many good things about Dover.

It’s true that Dover and I didn’t quite click. There’s the absence of enticing restaurants or eateries for a pedestrian visitor. At best, the city center lacks the vibrancy of any other seaside village in June and at worst, it produced uncomfortable vibes for a solo woman traveler. Vagrancy and a tolerance for visible drug use and drunkenness was off-putting. I’m no prude and can ignore quite a bit when a place is filled with young holiday-makers, but my first impression of Dover included a calculation of how many days I had before I could leave.

There are a few places in my travels that haven’t been instant hits – places where I want to flee or hole up in my room until I can grab my suitcase and run to the train station. These are the places where I question my decision to stay for a longer time to “get to know” a place. I wonder what possessed me to book for so many days, yet these are the destinations that often bring me the most satisfaction, if only for the simple reason of sticking it out. Some places might be contenders for Tim Moore’s book, You Are Awful (But I Like You) Travels Through Unloved Britain. Others just felt wrong to me for various, inexplicable reasons. Sticking it out, I’ve found, is often excruciating, but also makes me find the glitter in the debris. And there are gems hidden in places like Dover. I was sorry to leave Dover at the end of my “sticking it out” sentence.

There are three places in every stop that offer a tourist a glimpse of a new place – the Tourist Information Bureau, the local museum, and the public library. Dover’s tourist bureau and local museum reside together and the interior of the building is airy and seems spacious, even with all the usual tourist pamphlets. This is a recent move for the museum after some years of neglect and after most of the museum and contents were destroyed in the World War II bombing raids. The museum curators have worked to build the small, but impressive collection of artifacts. An unexpected treat was the exhibition dedicated to the successful English Channel swimmers displayed along the stairwells.

Like most of the country, Dover museum paid homage to the sacrifices and triumphs of World War I.

I did not visit the library in Dover and I am regretting it, because many libraries’ local history sections boast of local pride, from ghosts and murders to famous residents and, I suspect in Dover, a dominant theme of Carry On.

Dover’s main feature, besides the port, is its castle, built in the twelfth century and touted as the oldest castle in England. Unlike many castle attractions in the UK, Dover castle remains raw without much need for embellishment. There is a smallish interactive introduction to the castle and its inhabitants and an outline of its history. This is geared to educational visits, rather than catering to the tourist. Much of the castle is untouched by modern entertainment. There are two notable exceptions – the Great Tower and the tours of the tunnels. I chose to avoid the costumed guides or the hoopla of Henry II. I did visit the Secret War Tunnels where visitors can follow the planning and execution of Operation Dynamo, the Dunkirk rescue mission in WWII, when allied soldiers were saved by a multitude of British boats and ships. The tunnels are claustrophobic, as well as confusing, making it nearly impossible to allow visitors to wander alone underground. What I liked about the tour was the way the tour guide moved us along from room to room and tunnel to tunnel with stops to watch video footage projected on the walls. We gained a sense of the activity in the tunnels during WWII as we wandered past the names of soldiers and sailors scraped into the tunnel walls. There were informational placards at the displays, without the amusement park atmosphere found in so many castles and estates.

After the tour I wandered around the castle grounds (75 acres total), stopping at the Admiralty Lookout, where France is visible on a clear day and then walking up to the keep and on to the Chapel of St. Mary-in-Castro, a Saxon church still in use as a military chapel. Next to the chapel sits the Roman Pharos, a lighthouse built in AD 46. It was here I had my own “ghostly” encounter. Full disclosure here: I don’t think I actually believe in ghosts, but at the same time, I want to be proved wrong. Dover Castle also has the distinction of being named the most haunted place in England. This honor, however, seems to be bestowed on several places in England, depending on their tourist numbers.

Some of the more known ghosts consist of a man in a long cape and broad hat with flowing hair or a man’s legs without a torso or a man without his legs. Recently, a long-established drummer boy found his way to the other side with the help of a paranormal expert and his drum is now silent. There are many accounts of an officer being sighted in the tunnels, but there is a possibility that he is a hologram projected as part of the tour experience. There is only one encounter at the lighthouse that I can find and the person asks if anyone else has experienced anything there – no details. So here’s my story.

I visited Dover Castle at the end of June. It was a weekday, but the place was eerily empty of visitors. I ran into a few at the top of the tower and in the gift shops and waiting for the tunnel tours. When I visited the church and lighthouse, I was the only person there for at least half an hour. My habit is to find a church far from the notice of the guidebooks or only mentioned in the guidebooks as a historical sideline. A chapel in a castle is usually quiet and empty. That was the case with the Chapel of St. Mary-in-Castro. I sat inside for fifteen minutes, using the silence as a chance to meditate, contemplate, and to snoop around in the military chapel. The kneelers and the seat cushions were decorated with military insignias or memorials to fallen soldiers. I have no knowledge of medieval architecture, so I couldn’t tell what additions were made since its Saxon beginnings. It was a small chapel with a heavy, wood and metal door, and it was quiet. My thoughts focused on more personal and modern problems. I felt no ghostly fingertips (imagined or real). The temperature of the chapel did not turn icy. In fact, I reveled in the peaceful, relaxed mood I felt after my rest in the chapel. The door seemed heavier than before to open, but that was the only anomaly I noticed. I walked out of the chapel toward the lighthouse. That’s when I heard the laughter.

It was not the frenzied laughter of school children. It wasn’t the sinister playacting of a prankster. This laughter permeated terror. The overused cliché of unearthly is the only way I can describe it. Her laugh echoed from the pharos. I heard a woman laughing in fear and madness. By that time, I was familiar with the wild screeching of sea gulls and other sea birds. This was nothing like that. I looked around the tower for many minutes. I looked over the walls by the church. I looked down the slopes in each direction. I waited. Nobody else appeared.

Did I encounter a ghost? I rather doubt it, because there must be a reasonable explanation. The reason I can’t dismiss it with complete certainty is that I was not expecting or even desiring to find a ghost. I was at peace with myself and my surroundings. My mind was on the present. I do know that I never want to hear that horrible laughter ever again.

The fog around Arthur’s seat wasn’t thick and it didn’t obscure any part of the hill by resting on the top or reclining around the bottom by the lochs. It was more like a gossamer cloth revealing just enough of the shape of the hill and its various hues to invoke one’s imagination. Nature’s fan dance created interest as the fog moved around the park, revealing glimpses of images before hiding them again. The parking lot near Holyrood Park was quite empty. It seemed like a good time to explore more of the area without having to share it with the, you know, tourists.

I managed the actual climbing part of the park on the one morning, two days ago, when the clouds parted for us patient photographers with sub-standard climbing shoes. Now it was time to wander around a bit, stopping by St. Margaret’s loch to see the swans and then walking along Queen’s Drive with an occasional detour up a trail. Nothing too strenuous or too far from the madding crowd. So what was the difficulty? The problem was that I was stricken with a slight cold and had used those two days to catch up on my reading. Along with Arthur Conan Doyle, I read the local history of Arthur’s Seat. Bad idea.

Let me fill you in on some of the more colorful history. I’m not sure why, but fog seems to go hand-in-hand with the Victorian novel. Not that all of this history revolved around the Victorian era. It just fit the template for my highly-evolved imagination. What is it that people say? There’s nothing there in the dark that isn’t there in the daylight? Well that isn’t quite true, is it?

Anyone studying British modern history has heard of Burke and Hare, two men who traded in their canal building skills to provide bodies to Dr. John Knox for his Edinburgh anatomy lectures. There were religious and legal restrictions on autopsies, making bodies scarce for anatomy classes. Knox needed more and didn’t ask too many questions about how Burke and Hare happened upon so many available cadavers. From 1827-1828, Burke and Hare managed to “find” bodies by smothering their victims and then selling the bodies to the school. Hare turned King’s Evidence against Burke, who was convicted and hanged in 1829. I can’t say that any of these bodies were “found” around Arthur’s Seat, but a couple of boys in 1836 discovered seventeen miniature coffins in a cave along Arthur’s Seat. The number, which corresponds to Burke and Hare’s victims, was initially attributed to witchcraft, but now there’s some speculation that it was a memorial to the victims of Burke and Hare. Some of those coffins are displayed in the National Museum of Scotland.

Then there’s the story of the doctor who married and within a few weeks decided he had made a mistake. He attempted to pay others to help him get rid of the wife. The doctor’s first scheme involved paying someone to provide enough evidence against his wife that met the requirements of divorce. When this failed he hired his brother to poison his wife. The brother failed as well, so the doctor took his wife for a walk to Duddingston (a village accessed from the park). When alone, he happened to find a knife he had borrowed and stabbed her to death. The cairn marking the spot of her death was moved, so I’m not sure where along the way it happened. I can tell you that my thoughts were on that woman and her murder as I walked along the road to Duddingston.

And I don’t need to say much about a menacing hound and the fog. Dogs are rarely kept on a leash in Holyrood Park, so it is always likely one might encounter a hound. There’s Murder Acre and Hangman’s Craig and possibly some unexpected and not quite explained deaths from “accidental” falls. Might I happen upon a ghostly pair dueling in the mist? It is good that I hadn’t read much more. My heart was beyond its aerobic threshold. Ghostly fingers tickled my spine. And then I saw them as the fog lifted. Tour buses filled with Germans and Americans rolled by and stopped so their occupants could jump out for a quick picture of Edinburgh from above.

I resisted the urge to look back. Who knows what I might have seen following me as the fog dissipated.

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Horses and I share an on and off relationship. I get on and they toss me off. It began when I was twelve and a Shetland Pony, called Bluey, didn’t like it when my friend hit him with a thorn twig to encourage him to move forward. He moved all right — once he was rid of me. I fell like two inches or maybe even a little more and landed on my right arm. When I stood up, my arm was swinging in the space between my elbow and shoulder. That’s when I knew there was no love lost between me and horses of any kind.

After a mad rush from the town emergency room to Pocatello for a larger hospital and a specialist and after two weeks in traction, then who knows how long in a cast, and finally a physical therapy routine that generally required that I walk the hospital corridors with a bucket of rocks, I tried to get on a horse again. This was a bigger horse, so when it projected me over its head, I had more time to think about how to land. I ended up with a bruised tailbone, but no breaks. And thus began the dreaded phrase I would hear through the years, “But he/she is normally so gentle!”

The guides at Glacier Park put me on the slowest, dullest nag. This was a horse that was more docile than the ones they placed my children on. This horse was so ingrained in the tourist caravan that it might have been made of plastic and swaying in gentle motion as if it were on a merry-go-round. It decided to stop and eat. “You must be firm with your horse,” the guide instructed. “Pull her head up so she knows she cannot eat”. I yanked her head up. She turned her head with an “are you kidding me” kind of look and proceeded to rub me off on a tree. That’s pretty much how the rest of the ride went.

So when I realized the annual Riding of the Marches involved 270+ horses, not bicycles, I wondered why I was sitting on a concrete wall near the Scottish Parliament waiting to greet the procession. What can I say? I’m a sucker for pageantry. And I had my escape route planned – just a dive into the pool behind me and I could hug the wall and avoid any errant hooves. Scottish horses appear to have better manners than their American cousins. But, then again, I was holding to our agreement. I don’t get on and they don’t buck me off.

According to the website EdinburghGuide.com, the first record of The Riding of the Marches was in 1579, with riders covering the common land of the city. It continued until 1718. The website, calendarcustoms.com, explains the ride was also a commemoration to the Flodden Wall, built after the defeat of King James IV in 1513 at the Battle of Flodden where 10,000 Scotsmen died, including the king. In 2009, the Edinburgh March Riding Association (EMRA) reinstated the event as a charity re-enactment of the ride. This year’s ride supports the veterans organization Poppyscotland and commemorates the outbreak of World War I, when, according to edinburghspotlight.com, 6000 horsemen and 35,000 horses died in the conflict. Over 300 riders and horses were scheduled to participate this year.

A number of riders did not make it to the Royal Mile finish and I’m guessing under 200 passed by the Parliament, yet it was still quite moving to see the different riding clubs joining together with poppies attached to the horses and on the rider’s lapels. People cheered and clapped as the riders passed by, not unlike the entrance of the Tour de France into Paris, even though it was more subdued. Hikers climbing to Arthur’s Seat stopped along the trail to watch as the horses entered Holyrood Park. I sat next to a Scottish family and the young kilt-clad girls beside me said they were more excited to see the horses than they were to see Mickey Mouse. They told me about their own riding event coming up. They will parade and perform in costumes, the oldest dressing up as “the mean cat”.

I forgot, as promised in my last post, to look for Queen Elizabeths today. I certainly forgot to look for yellow butterflies. But, of course, I didn’t expect to see around 200 horses clip-clopping along the Royal Mile.

The old adage, or at least a take-off, is “you see what you want to see”. This can also apply to our life experience. So if we expect certain outcomes, we will attract those outcomes. For instance, if I want a better job, I might decide that it is impossible and look at all the reasons I cannot have that job. I won’t get a better job, because I see myself failing. One suggestion for overcoming that mindset is to look for unusual things in our daily lives. Pam Grout in her popular book, E², suggests that we look for yellow butterflies, even in the dead of winter. Somehow, somewhere those yellow butterflies will appear fluttering past the window or maybe stamped on the side of a paper cup. The trick is to count them. By counting the appearances of yellow butterflies in a certain time period, it proves that if you look for yellow butterflies, you will find them. And this principle can be applied to daily living. I was a little skeptical about how yellow butterflies can make a significant impact on one’s life. That is until I walked along Fleet Street after visiting St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Men’s summer business attire in London’s financial district appears to be a light blue, long-sleeved shirt worn with black pants. Tie and jacket are optional. Groups of blue-shirted men escaped their buildings at the lunch hour forming a river of blue along the pavement on Fleet Street. Some of the men jazzed it up a bit with a pin-stripe or even a checkered pattern, while adhering to the blue color scheme. In awe of the obvious conformity to what is deemed proper business attire, I decided to give the yellow butterfly experiment a try. I would count the men I saw in pink shirts on Fleet Street from St. Paul’s to where Fleet turns into Strand – just a few blocks. The rules were simple. Obvious tourists did not count. It had to be men that looked like they were part of the financial scene and they must be wearing suit trousers, not jeans. Up to this point, I had not seen anything close to a pink oxford shirt.

It was the strangest thing. I began to see pink shirts everywhere. I counted ten men that fit my criteria in a couple of blocks. As I continued onto Strand, pink shirts outnumbered the blue shirts. Maybe there’s something to this. It is hard for most modern women to walk down a busy street without making some comparisons, so I thought about looking at other women in a different way. Instead of noticing all the pulled-together, high-heeled, long-legged women, I looked for women in dresses who wore trainers. And it worked again. Women in lovely dresses or mini-skirted teens or well-dressed eighty-year-old women were wearing socks and athletic shoes. It seems we can alter our vision of the world in very simple ways. Maybe that applies to our relationships as well. If we expect certain behaviors from our children or spouses, we often are proved right. If we meet strangers and form an immediate opinion of them, do we reinforce our own stereotypical prejudices?

The woman sitting next to me on the train, who was on her cell phone for the first hour into the trip, was not a rude, don’t-care person. She turned out to be making an unexpected trip to see her sister who was going through a bad time, but she had to leave her ailing mother and new grandson to go cheer up her sister. The taxi driver that ignored me for the first five minutes? He had an intercom in his taxi that didn’t work very well. We ended up having a nice chat about Las Vegas and Scotland.

I must add a word of caution here. Sometimes people are exactly as they seem. I found myself in real trouble in Paris and in Norwich when I ignored my intuition. Luckily, I was able to extricate myself from both situations without more than a roughing up. These were isolated situations and far from the normal experiences I have had, but there are times it is better to keep those first impressions, even if you are wrong. Now, I will always put up defenses when I see groups of young men. It is unfortunate, but necessary.

What about yellow butterflies when you want to attract financial success or maybe just that guy down the street? The Law of Attraction will work for us when we focus on the outcome, right? Just thinking of our desire will manifest its appearance? Wrong. I want to believe that deep, constant, focused thinking can bring things or people into my life. This is where we misuse the Law of Attraction. I saw pink shirts on the street because men were wearing them. I did not pull pink shirts out of the air and dress those men. I paid attention to my surroundings. The key to success in our life, however we define success, is more than thinking about it. We must see the opportunities around us that will help us attain that success. It is important to think about what we want in life, but the key is to focus on that desire and to look for the yellow butterflies. The Law of Attraction is not a passive activity. We need to see the outcome, but we also have to participate in attracting our desires. It might be a good idea to introduce yourself to the guy down the street or to apply for that high-paying job. Sometimes things appear to fall into our laps. And, yes, there are times you get something with no effort. The most likely scenario for a positive outcome when applying the Law of Attraction, though, is that focusing on your desire makes you more likely to act on opportunities to bring that desire into your life. Rhonda Byrne found the Secret, but it required work to produce the movie and write her book.

I’m far from reaching my life’s goals. There are some very personal and improbable things I want to attract into my life. Getting back to Oxford was once a dream. Did it happen because I thought about it hard enough? Yes, sort of. I thought about it, but then I looked at the ways I could make it happen. There were obstacles, yet I recognized the opportunities I had to overcome those obstacles. Taking this trip was the realization of a dream. But this journey was relatively easy to make happen. Some of my other dreams are not as tangible and look to be far from my reach. I hope I can learn to see the pink shirts and the yellow butterflies when I go after those dreams.

I’m in Edinburgh now. I’ve noticed kilts and bagpipes and overflowing tour buses. There are souvenir shops surrounded by whiskey bars and cashmere stores. My flat is just behind the Palace of Holyroodhouse and the flat’s garden border is Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat. Perhaps tomorrow I should change my perspective and count how many Queen Elizabeths I see walking along the Royal Mile…