Day 11 - St. Andrews — Wayfaring Abroad

We woke up knowing that this was our last day in Scotland and that when the day was over we would be in London waiting for our flight back to the states.

I felt a real sense of urgency when I woke up to see as much as possible but also felt lethargic from being sad this trip was coming to a close.

Our first stop was at Balgrove Larder for some breakfast. We started out with a good meal and the sun was shining bright outside. There were little to no clouds in the sky and no fog whatsoever. This was easily the best weather we had while in Scotland and we didn't waste it.

We headed to St. Andrews Cathedral where we spent our time walking through the ruins and touring through the mini museum. We walked up the near 200 steps to the top of St. Rules Tower. This was a bit tough for me as it was skinny and the ceiling short, but I still made it.

Early morning sun at St. Andrews Cathedral.

We had the tower to ourselves and enjoyed expansive views out over St. Andrews, across the North Sea and over the countryside. It was a truly beautiful day but the cutting wind at the top of the tower meant we only spent about 20 minutes enjoying the view.

From the tower we slowly made our way back through the Cathedral grounds and out on the path by the sea towards St. Andrews Castle.

The Castle is another set of ruins and looked quite incredible with the sun hitting the front face. There were shadows over the inner courtyard and it made the castle feel alive. We decided, upon advice from my sister, not to tour through the mine and countermine. I was told that I would need to crawl through it and it would be way too uncomfortable.

So after walking through the castle grounds we left to head through town and off to West Sands Beach and St. Andrews golf course. On the way we stopped in a coffee shop to get something to warm us up.

The wind was still by the golf course and there were families out on the beach enjoying the sun. We walked along the beach a while before heading towards the golf course to walk along the fairways.

It was starting to get later and we still needed to grab lunch before driving south to Edinburgh to catch our flight.

We stopped back at Balgrove Larder because we felt like some soup and sandwich would be a perfect way to end our tour of St. Andrews.

St. Andrews Links with Swilken Bridge in the foreground.

While we were enjoying our lunch we decided to go over our flights and make sure everything looked alright. We learned that we were not in the seats we'd purchased months before. We also saw that we were not sitting together. This set off a small search for confirmations and receipts to get documentation before calling Lufthansa to figure out what happened.

Unfortunately, my phone decided that it was out of minutes and wouldn't make an outgoing call. This made no sense as I'd made only two phone calls on the trip and they lasted less than two minutes. So instead we decided we would hope to find a Lufthansa booth open when we got to London.

This was naive as we arrived in London too late and all the booths were closed. We found someone who told us that they open at 4 am so we should come back then. With that bit of bad news, we changed our seats online so that we were seated next to each other and then headed to our hotel for a couple hours sleep before our long journey home.