You can plan day trips as much as you like but sometimes they just don’t go as planned. Transport doesn’t work, the weather is horrible. The key is not to despair about having “lost” the day and to make the best of it. But first, back to the beginning of our story.
About halfway-through our trip, we had planned a day trip outside of Edinburgh to see something entirely new. After our trip to Glasgow, we had learned that you’re only able to travel with an off-peak ticket at certain times of the day, which led us to have to wait at the train station for over 40 minutes, although there were several trains leaving for Edinburgh. So this time we planned our times better and left on the first off-peak train to Linlithgow, a small town outside Edinburgh.
Day Trips Ruined by the Weather
Just a short 20 minutes’ train ride away from the centre of Edinburgh, it was meant to be the perfect quick day trip, with enough time left in the evening to do a Harry Potter Escape room. But then it started raining, in spite of the weather forecast being quite sure it wouldn’t. It was only a drizzle at first, so we walked the short distance to the castle. There we realized it was more of a ruin really, so visiting the castle wouldn’t exactly keep us dry. The other plan was a walk around the beautiful loch, which is only about 3km. Not that bad if it’s only drizzling and for some parts of the path, you may be protected a bit by trees. Well, we’ve thought like that before, when we visited picturesque Lake Bled in Slovenia. It was only raining a little bit, so we decided to walk around the lake to get a better look at the famous church in the middle. About halfway through the loop around the lake, it seriously started raining. In spite of wearing rain jackets, we were drenched down to our underwear. We decided to continue on the path, in the hope there would be a café on the way back to the village. There wasn’t. We finished the walk as quickly as possible and waited at the bus stop, along with a mass of other tourists who were equally drenched and just as ready to get onto one of the infrequent buses. So we didn’t want to risk a repeat of that.
How to Still See New Things
Since Linlithgow is a very small town, as we realized walking around it, there wasn’t much else to see other than some arts and craft shops. At this point we could have declared the day a disaster and taken the train back to Edinburgh. But we had come all the way here, so we also wanted to experience what a Scottish small town is like. This manner of thinking led us to a local pub. There we tried some local Scottish beer and had lunch. We talked a little to the locals. One of them told us the song that was playing reminded him of his girlfriend because he asked her father for permission to marry her the night before. But because it’s a small village he couldn’t tell anyone, except strangers like us. We also told him our story of getting engaged.
Other than that, we mostly just enjoyed the quiet ambience after spending the last week in over-crowded Edinburgh. It gave us the chance to count it as a rest day and have more energy to walk around, when the weather had cleared up.
True to small-town life, we ended off our trip by running to catch our train. We managed to sprint onto the platform just as the train arrived. That way we didn’t have to wait forever on the next train in the chilly weather, like I’ve done many times before, as someone from a small town myself.
