We were given dire warnings about a new storm arriving over North Scotland - Storm Erik - and certainly yesterday (Friday) afternoon was pretty wet round here and they were only allowing cars on the Tay Road Bridge when we travelled back from St Andrews, but last evening and this morning so far look relatively calm. Have we already passed the worst? I had tentatively planned to travel south again to Methil this afternoon to see Thistle play in the Scottish Cup against the (not so) mighty East Fife, but I changed my plans last night when I saw the weather forecast, and decided to settle down on the settee and watch Scotland against Ireland in the Six Nations.
So, we had a nice stay in St Andrews although we had a mini drama after breakfast yesterday when we couldn't get back in to our room - the door lock wouldn't respond to anybody's keys - not ours nor any of the staff. We went down to reception and reported it and the duty manager told the maintenance man and then off he went - we thought to immediately attend to the matter. However, half an hour came and went and there was no news - it transpired that the maintenance man thought we were merely advising him about the problem as we were leaving the hotel and he didn't realise all our belongings were still in the room and he had merely added it to his list of things to do that day!
When we managed to track him down again, I followed the engineer up to our room, but even he had problems getting in to our room - new keys were cut, the master key was tried and eventually the lock reset mechanism was used, but none of them worked. We had begun discussing having to break the door down when, in a last desperate effort, he wrenched the lock up and down violently and eventually it gave way and we were in!
As it happened, the delay of an hour and a half in our departure actually helped us as the early morning rain storm had now passed and the skies cleared and the sun came out, so we could, after all, revert to our original plan to take a walk round the Auld Grey Toon. We had thought we would have to stay indoors and our Plan B was to go to Dundee and do the new V & A (https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee) instead. That will now have to wait for another day.
Enough narrative, time for some photos. After a nice lunch with Barry, Helen and Dawn at Forgan's (https://www.forgans.co.uk/st-andrews/) on Thursday, we went back to our hotel and sat in the lounge with wonderful views of the Old Course and the beach and sea, watching the sun go down. It was twilight before I remembered to take a team photo. I had to have 2 attempts at it:
The remaining photos were taken on our Friday morning walk:
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| The castle |
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| At East Sands with the caravan site where Barry, Dawn and I went with Mum and Dad many years ago in the background. |
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| Outside our hotel with the R & A clubhouse in the background |
