Impending Vacation Excitement

[impulsereader]

I am vacationing in Edinburgh in early April – my first solo international trip – and I’m mystified at the lack of active travel communities on LJ. 

I’ll hopefully have access to a computer the entire time and I was hoping to do a sort of travel blog here and happily typed ‘travel’ into search by interest and received only a few results – at least in english - which had been updated recently, and none that seem to feature trip reports.  Oh well, I suppose there are more sites that are meant specifically for travel that people use.

I’m just at the point where I’m allowed to begin to be excited, less than three weeks out.  This is also when I start worrying I’ll be in a car accident or break my leg between now and then, causing my plan to spend two weeks walking around Edinburgh and its surrounds to go terribly awry.  That’s what I want to do, too, and it’s one of the reasons I decided to leave my guy behind.  I want to spend two weeks walking all day inside museums and outside in the Pentland Hills, seeing beautiful things and then drink a glass of wine before I go to bed exhausted.  If I took him with I think it would end up having the sort of feel of a death march, not exactly what you look for in a vacation.

I’m also obsessed with traveling lightly.  We always do just one bag apiece and avoid checking on the way out, but I’ll have laundry available so I’m thinking extreme like one pair of pants, three shirts and a dress.  I can always buy stuff there and end up with extra awesome souvenirs, right?

And this is a new one for me – I’m not going to bring any books – usually I pack more books than clothes.  I’ve always preferred magazines for airplanes, so I’m cleverly going to restrict myself to disposable reading material on the way out, and then I’m going to go into every bookstore I come across and take my chances.  I’ve read that Edinburgh is lousy with great second hand book stores, and I’m hoping that is still the case in this time of the digital book – the idea of which I am still holding out on staunchly.  Leave me my books!  I read on and peer at a computer screen all day because my cats need to eat crunchies every day and have a roof over their heads while we work.  When I go home I want to read a book in a leather recliner with a strong lamp illuminating the pages in front of me.  Or, you know, come here and stare at a computer some more.