While we were in Manchester, Eric started getting sick and I mean really sick from exposure to some kind of crazy sick he contracted from the flying Petri dish we’d spent hellish hours in getting to the UK. By the time we got to Bathgate, he was in full on sinus and chesty hell. That might be bad enough, but I quickly realized that my shoes were missing.
The face you are making right now as you read that is the same face I made when I realized my shoes (?) were missing. Seriously, WTF? I wore my comfy knitted boots for the trip, but somewhere along the way, and it eventually turned out to be in stupid Manchester at the stupid Hotel Football, I left my most comfortable penny loafers ever and my brand new Sketcher Shape-ups that were my shoe love of my life.
I have ONE type of walking shoe I can wear without my plantar fasciitis kicking up and it’s these:
They are normally $100, which is more than the sum total I have spent on shoes in my entire life. I got my first pair in a thrift store and just before I left for the trip, I bought another pair because I knew I would spend most of my time walking and climbing stairs. I waited for them to go on deep sale because if I pay $100 for a pair of shoes, they better do my dishes or sing songs or something. Plus this pair of penny loafers was just…ahhhh… the perfect shape of my feet.
Gone.
We called the places we stayed before and always got, “We will check with housekeeping and get back to you,” meaning, “We will give it some time and see which of our maids have nice new walking shoes and will see if she is willing to part with them.” No one ever “got back to” us, so we had to call again and again.
Finally, someone from Hotel Football replied to my email and it seriously went like this:
“We need to know what room you stayed in.”
Clearly, they could not research it by our last night, which is one of the most unique you can imagine. There are not a lot of “Rasbolds” in the US and we are related to most of them. There are even fewer in the UK, I am certain.
After much mental straining to remember that particular room number, it was:
“I need for you to describe the shoes so that we know if the shoes we found in room 805 were actually yours.”
O_O
I described the shoes.
“Yes, we have your shoes. When can you pick them up?”
By the time the conversation took place, we were already back in London and had returned the rental car. They refused to ship the shoes to me, even at my expense, and insisted I had to come get them myself or pay for a courier to come and get them.
Therefore, I do not have my shoes.
I grieve. Oh how I grieve.
Because Eric was so ill and the bed and breakfast only offered a full sized bed, I ended up sleeping (mostly not sleeping) in a fairly uncomfortable chair with the upper part of my body flopped over onto a pile of suitcases.
Eric was not quite as enamored as I was with Scotland, whether it was his sickness or his fondness for places further south, so we did not linger there as we thought we would. That is the benefit of turning this into a road trip is that we could follow our whims.
Our day in Edinburgh involved Edinburgh Castle, The Royal Mile, and Holyrood Palace, then on to the historic Sheep Heid Inn for Sunday Roast.
Posting this one because it made me smile (swearing is involved)
