these weeks in the odyssey
10.11.99 -- 10.25.99
edinburgh, scotland

You're Not Extreme

As an occasional reader of this feature, you may have noticed that we rarely entertain visitors here on the Office Odyssey. There's a good reason for this. You see, we don't have any friends. People hate us. No, wait...that's not it. Oh, yeah -- it's because we stink. Yup, and to high heaven, too, like a rotting salmon carcass three days after the spawn. Hmmm...actually, that's not it either (at least that we know of...should that little itch be telling us something?). Well, could it be that other people are just a wee bit intimidated by the whole "Extreme" thing? That they find themselves, shall we say, daunted? Anxious as to whether or not they could possibly measure up to our exacting Extreme standards?

Yes, that's it exactly. And can we blame them? I mean, when you see how our lives play out as great glittering sagas alive with mirth, merriment, and -- dare I say it? -- danger, you can't help but wonder if you could possibly keep up with us. At least that's what Keith and Tanya told us as they got off the train in Edinburgh, ready for a week's worth of fun, Office Odyssey-style. Fortunately, their worries were somewhat assuaged as we got them up to our apartment, sat them down on the sofa, and went over our TV-viewing schedule for the week. "Yep, we got 'Friends' on Mondays and Fridays, 'Family Pet Rescue' every day at 5:30, and the 'Sopranos' is on Thursday nights. So, we've got a pretty full plate ahead for you guys...think you're up to it?"

Yes, we're pretty much as Extreme as we wanna be. Which is to say, almost not at all. Still, since Keith and Tanya were here for only a week, we decided to throw caution to the wind, let the TV schedule be damned, and head off into the wilds of Edinburgh, arms open to whatever life might bring us. Of course, this meant that first we had to prise Kristanne off the couch and drag her kicking and screaming down to the bus station so that we could enjoy a brisk (read, "bone-chilling") open-top bus tour of Edinburgh. I think you can see by that picture at left that Kristanne was a little bit reticent about being away from the comforts of her comfy couch and cozy slippers. Subtle clues include the maniacal expression on her face and the blackjack Keith is hiding behind that brochure just in case Kristanne gets antsy and tries to make a break for it. Nothing like a little negative reinforcement therapy to keep the sightseeing moving along, I tell ya!

Having been awake for some 26 hours, Keith and Tanya were starting to drag tail a little bit. Open-top bus tours are great, but they needed something extra to keep them percolating along, something to help them shake off the effects of travel and keep them mushing along that tourist trail. After Kristanne's initial suggestion of "crack, crack, and more crack" was rejected as being perhaps just a mite too extreme, we decided that there's nothing to perk you up like a famous dead Scottie dog's gravesite.

Of course, this is no ordinary famous dead Scottie dog! Nope, this is the world famous Greyfriars Bobby, the lovable little rascal that started out by charming an entire city and then went on to charm the entire world in the famous Disney movie of the same name. Yes, that Greyfriars Bobby!

Yeah, well, I'd never heard of him either. Still, they make an awful big to do about him over here, so we decided to check it out and see what all the fuss was about. Here's the condensed Story of Greyfriars Bobby for you, the attention-span deprived:

• Policeman has dog.
• Dog's name is Bobby.
• Policeman dies.
• Policeman buried in Greyfriar's Abbey
• Dog sits by policeman's grave every day.
• People are amazed.
• Dog dies.
• People use dog's life as apt analogy for Ed McMahon's post-Tonight Show career.

One dead dog can stimulate you for only so long, though, before you need something more to keep you going. Something you can count on. Something that's been there for you before in your hour of need. Could it be a teddy bear? Your mom on the phone? The music of James Taylor? A sock puppet named, "Whistle Binkie?"

Well, yes, I suppose that technically it could be any one of those things. However, in this case, it's beer. And not just any beer, either! Look at the size of that baby Tanya's cradling in her trembling hands! This was only a size large, too. Apparently, if you order the extra large, they just tilt your head under the tap and crank that sucker open for fifteen minutes. As it was, they had to trundle this one out on a hand cart and fit Tanya with one of those back braces you see the guys on the loading docks wear before they would let her try to hoist it. Tanya agreed that this particular beer was well worth the extra bother, though she didn't exactly appreciate Keith's underhanded attempts to pilfer her pilsner when she wasn't perpetually peering at it (ah, purposeless alliteration!). Check out that look of covetous amazement on Keith's face in that pic at left -- clearly the expression of a man who will stop at nothing to get the beer of his dreams.

What Greyfriars Bobby couldn't do, the beer quickly did...Keith and Tanya were soon back on their feet (well, on their barstools, anyway) and ready for more Extreme action. That's when I saw my opening. That's when I suggested the unsuggestible. That's when I made my move toward the stone and prepared to draw forth the sword of Arthurian legend. That's when I put my left foot in, put my left foot out. Yes, I put my left foot in, and I shook it all about.

Yep -- I did the hokey-pokey. Of course, there was a method to my madness, a design to my dance, even a purpose to my prancing...it was haggis time. Time to put away the talking and start the walking. Time to quit messing around with the lesser Scottish culinary delights -- the shortbread and scones, the toasties and stovies -- and get on to the real deal, the stuff of legend, the much-maligned, oft-misunderstood haggis. And, if you're going to eat a haggis, well, it sure can't hurt to have done the hokey-pokey beforehand, if you know what I'm saying.

NOTE TO BUDDING WRITERS: When aspiring to the butter-smooth transitions so associated with quality prose, do your best to avoid segueing from the hokey-pokey to the haggis, especially when you're just starting out. The "hokey-pokey to haggis" transition is an advanced technique best left to professionals and\or complete hackers. Forewarned is forearmed.

But what is a haggis? And why would you eat one? The first part is easy -- it's chopped up lungs, heart, and liver mixed with oatmeal and boiled in a sheep's stomach. Tempting, huh? The second part, alas, is not so simple. Why, after all, would one do anything? Why did Sir Edmund Hillary climb Mt. Everest? Why did Lewis and Clark explore the Northwest Territories? Why did the members of KISS ever think that recording solo albums was a good idea? The answer in each case was, of course, alcohol. They were all completely blitzed at the time. A lot of people don't know that about Sir Edmund Hillary, but he did the whole thing as a result of a drunken bet in a bar in Tibet. Say this for the man -- he sure didn't welch on his bets.

So, a haggis it was to be for me, too. My own personal Mt. Everest, Northwest Territories, and solo album all rolled into one. There you see it pictured at right, glistening amidst the tatties and neeps (mashed potatoes and turnips), a shining culinary beacon to all those who would dare venture beyond the tried and true. So, what was it like, I hear you asking. Did it make you gag? Well, the short answer is that it was actually pretty darn good. It tasted a bit like a breakfast sausage (which really makes you wonder what the hell Jimmy Dean is up to with his own products) with a slightly more mealy texture. If I ever get the urge to record another solo album, I may even have another. Or not.

Haggis is really kind of a nice punctuation mark for a day. There's just not a heckuva lot you can do to top it once it has come and gone. So, after a few more beers and a dessert of deep-fried food at the Clamshell (a late-hours fried-food stand, about which the less said the better), it was off to bed for a little well-earned rest for Keith and Tanya before tackling the next day's festivities.

Did I say a "little well-earned rest?" Strike that -- let's go for "sixteen hours of solid slumber that strains even the most credulous of observers." Rip Van Winkle slept less than these two. Still, once they were up, they were up. Keith and Tanya possess the most amazing ability to go from the deepest sleep, sawing the thickest logs, straight to full-tilt boogie tourism. They don't even really stop for breakfast, popping out of their beds, into their clothes, and out the door before we even really realized they were awake, a shout trailing up the stairs after them that they would meet us in four hours at the Scotch Whisky Heritage Center and "don't be late, punks."

Ah, the Scotch Whisky Heritage Center! We'd been kinda saving this particular excursion for when Keith and Tanya arrived, hoping that they'd find it to be just as much of an authentic attraction as ourselves. Scotch -- what could possibly be more Scottish, right? So, it was with no small amount of surprise that we learned that our tour leader's name was "Heike" and that she was pretty much fresh off the boat from Germany. Why anyone thought this was a good place for her to get her first job in Scotland is kinda beyond me. We really wanted our stereotypically Scottish experience. I was hoping for a kilt-clad old fellow named Angus with a red beard down to his knees who would (hopefully) address me as "laddybucks" in between pulls on the little flask he kept carefully concealed beneath his bagpipe. Instead, we got Heike and all her Teutonic precision. Our first clue that the reality of our tour would be somewhat different than my visions for it came when she whacked me across the knuckles with a ruler for talking during the movie part of the presentation (hissing the word "Schweinhund" at me while she did it). Ouch. Where's Angus?

Things devolved from there as she took us into the fake malting room and started lecturing -- "Und zees ist vere vee malt zee vwhisky. Questions? Nein? Sehr gut!" With a click of her heels, she marched us into the next room with no wasted effort. Things were getting slightly frightening.

Things went straight from frightening to completely surreal as we got to the final part of the tour. With an evil glint in her eye, Heike strapped us into these cheesy motorized plastic contraptions apparently made to resemble the barrels in which scotch is aged (somewhat dimly pictured at left). Then, it was off to the weird zone as our barrels moseyed out of the station and on into the darkness, rolling past dioramas made to resemble pages out of the long history of scotch. Improbable mannequins stood huddled around a small still, waiting to receive its life-giving goodness. Whisky bandits peered out from behind rocks, waiting to ambush the small distiller on the way to market with his goods. Each motorized barrel was equipped with a little speaker which narrated your journey through the life and times of scotch. Unfortunately, each speaker was slightly out of sync with the ones in front and behind it so you ended up with this addled cacophony of what was essentially gibberish to begin with.

Events took a rapid turn for the worse when our motorized barrels abruptly stopped in the first major corner of the trail. We were in a four-barrel convoy with Keith and Tanya, the first of our small group to depart, so we could only watch with a mixture of horror and shock as the barrel behind us, well, barreled down on us at speeds approaching half a mile per day. Powerless to stop the impending disaster, we met our doom with a straight face as the fellow behind rammed us at full speed. Ouch. Bad craziness at the whisky heritage center, I tell you! Not wanting to be stuck in this Disney-gone-mad hell for the rest of our lives, Kristanne and I proceeded to get out of our barrels and push our little convoy on down the track, even though we were pretty sure it would mean a stiff punishment at the hands of Heike the Horrible.

Thankfully, we were wrong. In fact, Heike even went so far as to offer us another complimentary dram of Scotch once we got down to the tasting center by way of apologizing for our troubles. What a sport! Of course, we were all pretty much petrified to drink it for fear of what she might put in it, but, still what a sport!

At this point we were pretty much ready to get the heck out of the Scotch Whisky Heritage Center. Fortunately for us, though, yours truly, Sid "Micro Bladder" Heaton, had to go to the loo again. Yes, fortunately indeed, for if I hadn't gone, we might well have missed what was in fact the winner of the coveted Loo Of The Year award back in 1997! Oh, and what a loo it was, too! It had sinks and towels and, umm, other loo stuff. Fantastic! We could definitely see what had separated this baby from the others back in 1997. We all went twice to commemorate the occasion and then it was out to the street to celebrate our good fortune.

It's not every day that you get to use the Loo Of The Year, so we decided to celebrate by embarking upon the time-honored tradition of the pub crawl. Edinburgh features a longish pedestrian street called Rose Street, stuffed chock-a-block with pubs, pubs, and more pubs. Reasoning that one of them must surely have at least rated an Honorable Mention for Loo Of The Year, we set out to see how many of them we could visit in a single evening. And, shoot, while we were there, why not have a beer in some of these pubs as well? Why not, indeed?

Hangovers. That's why not. Huge, hammering hangovers that remove your belief in the existence of a life beyond pain. There's really only one cure for a hangover and that's golf (trust me...I'm a medical doctor). We started the day by renting a car and driving out east of Edinburgh towards North Berwick. The area around Edinburgh is just littered with golf courses of all shapes and sizes. Some of the most famous in the world, in fact, are right around Edinburgh. These include Muirfield (to the east), St. Andrews (to the northeast), and Carnoustie (nowhere near Edinburgh at all, but I needed three items to complete that series...bear with me). We knew we really didn't have the expertise to play any of the best courses, so we set about scanning the countryside, looking for the course that would best fit our skill level. We knew we'd found it when we saw that sign you see pictured there at left. Perhaps they knew we were coming?

The course we chose turned out to be a dandy. It was called Gullane and was immediately adjacent to its more famous big brother, Muirfield. Gullane featured three full 18-hole courses, each offering a different challenge for all levels of golfers. Since they didn't have a putt-putt course, we opted for the next best thing and set out for some old-fashioned golf, Scottish links style.

As luck would have it, we ended up with the perfect day to play. Clear skies and unseasonably high temperatures greeted us as we began hacking our way around the course, doing our best to lose each of the dozen used golf balls we had purchased just as quickly as possible. I, myself, was doing yeoman work in this regard, averaging a ball lost per hole for the first five or six holes. After that, I slowed down and contented myself with losing a ball only every other hole. Meanwhile, Kristanne and Tanya had adopted the strategy of never hitting the ball further than 20 yards, thereby minimizing the odds of losing balls. Good thinking. I considered this strategy, even going so far as to play all my approach shots from 40 yards in with a putter for a few holes. I was not encouraged by the fact that this actually improved my scoring. Who was it who said, "golf sucks?" Oh yeah -- that was me. Each and every hole, in fact.

Nah, the quote I was really looking for was, "golf is a good walk spoiled." Nothing could have been further from the truth in our fortunate case. Playing a beautiful course in shirtsleeves in the middle of October in Scotland was simply a wonderful thing.

Traveling to St. Andrews later in the week only confirmed our wisdom in having chosen Gullane over something more challenging. Not only was the weather a little dicier on Sunday (as you can see in that picture looking up the eighteenth fairway of the St. Andrews Old Course to the Royal and Ancient Clubhouse), but the golf appeared to be much trickier, too. St. Andrews' Old Course is closed to play most Sundays, so you're allowed to walk it at your will, exploring the challenges that the world's best golfers face when here to contest a tournament at the "home of golf." Undulating fairways with even lies few and far between. Multi-tiered greens ripe for impossible pin placements. Rough so thick and high that you worry about the possibility of getting your body out of it, let alone your ball. And then, there's the biggest danger of all.

Yes, the rare and dreaded Feral Gophers of St. Andrews. Hunted to extinction on courses throughout the rest of Scotland, these fearsome predators are still allowed to stalk the grounds of St. Andrews, laying in wait in the deepest recesses of the Old Course's bottomless sand traps. There they lurk, waiting only to reveal themselves with a horrible shriek as they pounce on the unsuspecting golfer unlucky enough to find themselves in the bunker. The haunting cries of mauled golfers can fill the air with a symphony of sorrow on a bad day at the Old Course. It was only through a rare display of personal courage on my part that we were able to get that snap you see at right. I fought him off with the sand trap rake just long enough for Kristanne to snap that very shot. Stunning!

Actually, maybe the only stunning thing is the amount of pure hooey I try to stuff into each and every iteration of this web page. It's a personal goal. Still, there is a grain of truth in the preceding paragraph. Even though Keith is neither feral nor a gopher, he is actually standing in a typical St. Andrews bunker. I'm standing in one, too, from just across a narrow strip of land between the two. Keith is also well over six feet tall, so you get a feel for how deep these bad boys are. You could give me 20 strokes, two tees, and a snow shovel, and I still wouldn't be able to get a ball out one of these without throwing it. Yikes.

From the depths of the golf bunker, we take you to the depths of Scotland's Secret Bunker (if only so I can say things like "from bunker to bunker" with a straight face). Hidden in the farmlands neighboring St. Andrews and cleverly concealed beneath a faux farm building, the Scots built what would have been the seat of government in the event of a nuclear war. Since the end of the Cold War, they've decommissioned it, allowing ordinary tourist yokels like me and you clamber down into its downright spooky innards. Speaking of the Cold War, am I the only one who noticed how the start of the whole global warming problem coincided fairly neatly with its end? Coincidence? Almost certainly.

The Secret Bunker was really quite amazing. It was constructed over 100 feet below the Earth's surface and was surrounded by ten feet of reinforced concrete in most places. It had recirculation gear that could allow its inhabitants to exist with the bunker hermetically sealed for periods of months. Seeing how the military prepared for such an eventuality really brought home the twin forces of absurdity and terror swirling around most discussions of nuclear war. That picture at left is of the main command room for Scotland once armageddon hit. Each main office of the government was assigned an individual desk in the command room. At the center of it all was that super cool translucent map...just like in War Games!

Of course, once you've explored the potential horrors of nuclear war, you know what time it is: yep, dress-up time! The good folks at the secret bunker had seen fit to provide us with a bunch of gear for reenacting what might have been our own little role in the nuclear holocaust. Cool! In no time, we had ourselves arranged into a neat micro-drama of what life in the secret bunker might really have been like had the unthinkable ever found itself thunk. You can practically taste the tension in that picture there at right as I give Kristanne a good chewing out for stealing my officer's cap.

Eventually, though, you run out of bunker puns and there's nothing left to do but get back in the car for the real staple of the Office Odyssey experience -- driving. Ever the gracious hosts, Kristanne and I made sure to ask Keith and Tanya if they were the sort of couple that enjoyed a leisurely drive through the countryside, taking in the sights. Not everyone is, you know. In fact, Keith and Tanya were not either, assuring us that they would much rather shave their heads with cheese graters while listening to the new Hanson album than find themselves stuck in the backseat of a rental car all day. Naturally, we took this as a light hearted joke on their part, and proceeded to put them in the backseat and drive about the countryside, taking in the sights, as though they were not even in the car. It was a great day!

A great day, that is, until Keith and Tanya began sowing the seeds of rebellion. There you see them at left, two shady characters plotting our eventual downfall in a violent putsch to take place the next time we stopped at a mini-mart. Fortunately, Kristanne and I got wind of their little coup de'rental car plan and headed off any potential nastiness by stealing their valuables and locking them both in the trunk. Well, no. Actually, we just got on the highway back to Edinburgh, assuring them that we wouldn't be stopping for any roadside attractions along the way.

A full day in the car can really make a body thirsty. So, after another night of revelry in the pubs followed by a late evening repast at the Clamshell (we took pictures this time, the whole Clamshell Family getting in on the action), we headed home and into our beds.

And, as soon as it began, the week was over. Too soon, we bade Keith and Tanya a fond Extreme farewell, humbly beseeching Keith not to make good on his threats to start a new website entitled, "Why Sid and Kristanne Are Neither Extreme Nor Telecommuters Dot Com." There you see them walking away into the distance at right, giving a friendly wave as they shout in unison across the street, "You're not Extreme!" Don't let the truth get out there guys -- it's too ugly.

Thus endeth another week on the Odyssey. And what's with all the Olde English speaking going on here, too? "Bade?" "Beseech?" "Thus endeth?" I'm just going to stop that anon so we can get back to the nineties. Yes, the nineteen nineties.

Check back next time as we leave Edinburgh eating our dust, flying out for Dusseldorf, a town that is widely reputed to be in Germany. Where will we stop after that? It could be Prague or it could be somewhere between Dusseldorf and Prague depending on what we see en route...check back next time to find out for sure. See you next time on the Odyssey!

Last Week's Front Page Picture

As for that picture at left, that's just another day in the whiz-bang life of the Office Odyssey, touring castles and taking pictures. This particular castle is Hailes Castle, a castle which, according to its descriptive historical literature, "though never actually under siege, was often attacked." Those particular people in front of the castle are Keith, Tanya, Kristanne, and Sid, a group of people who, according to their descriptive historical literature, "though never actually thirsty, often drank beer." Historical literature can be a surprisingly omnipresent (and eerily accurate) thing.