Figure 8 On A Bike

With some things squared away in Liverpool , we were ready to take a vacation from our vacation and spend about a week in Kraków , Poland, for the Unsound Music Festival. Poland Unsound is a music festival that "focuses on a broad swath of contemporary music — emerging, experimental, and leftfield — whose sweep doesn't follow typical genre constraints". Basically a bunch of weird music that I like to listen to and Susan finds herself enjoying a surprising amount of the time. I'd wanted to attend Unsound for years, ever since I read about an event there where Burial performed underground in some salt mines (more on the salt mines later), so I was super excited for this part of the trip to finally be happening :). Our RyanAir flight left fairly early in the morning, so at about 4 AM we groggily shouldered our packs and stumbled groggily (and as quietly as we could) out of our hosts' home to start the ~40 minute walk to John Lennon International Airport, doing our ...

Bonus photos from Scotland! Too much neat stuff to share to make it in all the posts Heading towards nice camping at the Gleeb!

The morning after Storm Agnes, we had a lovely breakfast in the guesthouse. I stayed in their nice bathrobe as long as I could, but eventually we had to bike to the ferry in Ardrossan . We got our tickets and Ben did that thing he does where it is REALLY close to time to board (to my anxious brain it is very close, in reality there is just enough time, and in Ben's brain he has like all the time in the world) and he disappears to go to the bathroom. He barely showed up in time for us to board before the cars. PHEW. The ferry has a LOT of signs about not being mean to staff. We had seen a truck the day before with a sign angrily criticizing the ferry company. We chatted with some folks, I guess the ferry had been really unreliable recently and hasn't been updated in forever and people had been upset as it is the only way on or off the island so when it gets canceled it is very disruptive. *fingers crossed we don't get stuck on an island again On the boat towards Arran...

Some nice young bros at Ballater Hostel had made us a little insecure about our priorities, asking us "Do you only do sports? Or do you ever see any castles, or do anything cultural?", so we decided it'd be worth it to spend a few days checking out the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Our timetable didn't allow us to bike all the way from Ballater to Edinburgh (nor did our fatigue), so first it was back to Aberdeen and then onto a train bound south. Applying our hard-won real-world knowledge, we decided NOT to take the entire Deeside Way back to Aberdeen , sticking to the paved roads for the parts of the bike trail that we knew would be particularly rough and hilly. However, because it's simply not allowed for us to go too long without seeing a bike mechanic, Susan's fork broke AGAIN. The same front rack that had so many problems broke another bolt - but the top one this time! At first it seemed like maybe it was better that the other bolt broke... until we...