Borders Country Can Bury My Heart

I have a lovely friend named Hege, from Norway, who also has lovely friends who have made the past two weekend trips wonderfully fun. This time our second pair were Heidi from France and Ingvild from Norway. The trip was with the International Society and the destination Borders Country, a.k.a that place where Scotland and England seamlessly blend.

Traveling with the International Society is an adventure in itself. One spends hours on a tour bus getting cramps, munching on snacks, and watching one or two obligatory awful movies (this time Ants and The Mask). That is perhaps the negative side. The positive side is all the beautiful scenery out the window and the unique circumstances, such as the student leader who couldn't string words together in a full sentence and giggled or "ummed" every four words (poor girl, we made fun of her so much, but she was American, mind you, so it was no second language barrier) and didn't know where we were going so our hour ride to the hostel from our last destination lasted three hours when we got lost or the Germans singing Backstreet Boys songs right behind us.

The time not spent on the bus was spent exploring Linlithogow Palace, ruins of the Stuart family castle where Mary Queen of Scots was born; Rosslyn Chapel, the chapel made famous by the Davinci Code, a place of carved wonders, serious restoration work, jealous masons and apprentices, and rumoured (according to our top notch tour guide) to be the final resting place of the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the mummified head of God, and Elvis; the town of Jedburgh (we missed entrance to the Abbey by about ten minutes); Vindolanda, highly excavated and archealogically rich ruins of a Roman fort along Hadrian's Wall; Hadrian's Wall (AMAZING); Melrose Abbey, built in 1136 A.D. for some Augustinian monks, and where three embalmed hearts have been found, one of which is honestly believed to be the heart of Robert the Bruce; and, inbetween all that, rushing through a supermarket where we were instructed to buy all our meals for the weekend because no one knew if we were going to have access to food for the next 24-some hours, as we were of course so far away (or back in time) from civilization we may have starved.

Hadrian's Wall, which was by far the highlight of the trip, was breathtaking. Due to a poorly planned, jam-packed two days of sightseeing, we only had half an hour to climb the craggy hill to scale the ancient wall that in it's time reached across the island from the North Sea in the East to the Irish Sea in the West, separating Roman Britannia from the barbarous north for the four centuries that all roads (in Britain) led to Rome.

I would go back here, to the Wall and to the region, in an instant. When the bus was winding through the hills -passing fields of sheep, dense forests, brooks, small content towns- all I could think about was how I wanted to get out of the bus and just run from summit to summit and found I had a reknewed desire to learn how to ride horses and bury my head in stories of Avalon and Lord of the Rings. I curbed my lust for this beautiful country by buying a Historical Site map of Ancient Britain which I will spend the rest of the semester pouring over until I have it memorized.

Pictures to come soon, but photography will very honestly never be able to capture the vastness of the sky, movement of the hills, or force of the wind from that mystical, invigorating country.

-Karen