Scotland Trip: Favorite Quotes

As those who've known me long enough in real life know, for about 15 years now (!) I've kept a running log of funny quotes from friends and things overheard, known (mostly just to me) as the Archives. I'm not necessarily recording these "for" anything – I just like capturing those moments and being able to revisit them later. On this trip, though, someone saw me scribbling things down, and assumed it was material for a blog post. Which made me think, huh.

So maybe I'll start adding Archives to my travel blogging or maybe I won't, but in any case here are some favorite quotes from the Scotland trip:

* Scott (one of the guys from Aberdeen we met on the West Highland Way) asks us, "Didn't you see the two people sleeping? [along the hiking path] We think they were German." Everyone wants to know what he's basing that on and he says it's "Because they woke up and said 'Achtung!'" We all laugh at the idea that all Germans wake up in the morning and the first thing they say is "Achtung!" Then Kat and Maike say to me, What, you've been living in Germany for five years and you still don't do that?

* Scott tells us about someone in Qatar asking him where he was from; he said Scotland, but that didn't register at all, then U.K., but that didn't register, so he tried, "You know England?" "Yeah, yeah." "It's north of there." "Oh... [long pause] You wear skirt?"

* Walking out on the coast by Ness, at the northernmost tip of the Isle of Lewis, we see a gloomy-looking old water tower with a sign reading, "for sale by auction." Tim says he'd like to buy it, just so he could be an evil overlord and have that as his fortress. I laugh at the idea of being the evil overlord of...the Isle of Lewis. Tim agrees, "Mwa ha ha, I will take ALL the peat!"

* Also, Tim talks about hearing some guys speaking in Gaelic, and then suddenly out popped, in English, the phrase, "the Donald Trump of the Outer Hebrides," followed by the conversation continuing in Gaelic. He says he really wished he could have understood more of that conversation!