A day in and going to Carlisle

On Tuesday, Oscar and I mainly stay inside.  John has a lunch with

a college friend who now works at the University of Edinburgh.  We do get dressed and head down the street to Kama Sutra for Indian for dinner.  This was by far the best Indian food we’ve had on the trip.  Oscar gets a mango lassi and eats some fries from here with a waffle and ice cream for dessert.  So, he’s crowing at the end

of the night that he “likes Indian food mommy”.  I don’t know if I would go that far, but he’s being adventurous for him and he did eat at an Indian food restaurant….but John and I demolished two plates of naan, a plate of rice, small plates of chicken korma, butter chicken, and tikka marsala.  So, that was a nice end to the day before we have a trip to Carlisle planned.  Which is good because it will take our minds off worrying about things that we can’t control like if we should go to Germany or not.  Their numbers are

exploding and we have given thought to trying to divert ourselves straight to Egypt from here in order to get Oscar’s wish for pyramids and camels down.  We have been checking on trains, flights and ways in and out every morning or night.  There’s all these nights with waking up in the middle of the night with concerns and fears.  It’s really putting a damper on the whole trip.  But Oscar is super excited today because we found an I spy book about things to look for on a train trip at a charity shop and he is so excited to see how much that he can find.  Well, we’re able to find

damn near everything at Waverly Station in Edinburgh and he’s over the moon.  Now, I just have to spend the whole train trip looking for things out the window that are in the book, but it keeps him entertained.  We only have a couple of stops and the one before Carlisle which is just over the border in England, Lockerbie, Scotland.  John looks at me and says, “that Lockerbie?”  And I guess it’s the only Lockerbie that can be in Scotland right?  It’s amazing how some places become synonymous with horror and

 bad things….that plane went down many years ago, but just the name makes the hairs on your neck stand up.  It’s better when things happen in a place that doesn’t become the “name” for it.   We arrive in Carlisle and realize that there is still no easy way

to see Hadrian’s Wall even from here.  We decide to have some lunch and just go to the museum here and look around the city.  After a less than stellar lunch at the Griffin pub (they put pesto on Oscar’s pizza which was awful), we headed in to town.  This is a great town that looks like movies are shot here with the castle, the keep, the gates.  There is a ton of shopping in the middle of town and John will be leaving before Oscar and I to go to Glasgow, so there are things that we can do without him.