July 11, 2025
Intro
Today’s my last day on vacation proper; tomorrow I head back to the States, and then I’ve got one rest day before going back to work, where I’m sure things will be hectic since I’ve been gone for over 2 weeks. I suppose now’s the time to sit and think a bit about how everything went.
Admittedly, I’m already feeling a bit of the post-travel blues. Two weeks of nonstop travel, friends, and activities is a lot of a body to endure, especially when they’re halfway around the world from their home and trying to cram as much in as they can. I can say my mood is probably not helped by the horrendous allergies I’ve been dealing with here in Scotland, nor the looming threat of catching up with everybody in the coming week or two and hearing about some small bits of drama I know are coming my way. But still, travel can’t last forever; I’m not cut out for the digital nomad lifestyle, and I’ve got responsibilities to attend to at home, things to look after and do that I can’t when I’m halfway across the world, even when I’m able to hook up to my own private server sitting in the basement of my parent’s house.
London/Reading
I’ve already covered the week at ESA; I didn’t expect anything that intense or that amazing to happen, but it did, and so I didn’t expect anything to top it this past week in the UK, and it hasn’t. But it’s been damn good nonetheless. One of the benefits of making friends through the World Wide Web is that I can simply ask them if I can stay at their place or meet up with them, and more often than not I get a yes. I met up with two wonderful friends (and one boyfriend of one of said friends) in Reading early in the week and crashed at their place, then managed to navgiate the London Tube and take a train up to Dundee to visit another for a few days. I’m going to reiterate myself a bit here just so I have everything in one post.
The friends I met in London and I were both a bit late to the airport, so that thankfully worked out. This is especially notable because I couldn’t get my phone to hook up to the WiFi in the airport and despite putting a new UK SIM card in it, it wasn’t connecting to the WiFi properly. I’ll get into the burner phone review later, though. Point being, I was safely united with my friend and her boyfriend and they were wonderful hosts. They took me back to their place to drop my things, got me Greggs breakfast, and then we had a great time at KEW Gardens where we met up with a mutual friend of ours, an Irishman who happened to be in town for a few weeks yet working on academic studies. After getting caught out in the rain, we headed over to a pub and had a solid meal before parting ways and heading back to my friend’s place, where upon sitting down and setting up my cell phone properly (we have data!) I realized I was absolutely exhausted.
I woke up an hour earlier than intended the next morning; my alarm clock was still set to Central European Time, and I didn’t realize it until I was well out the door, so I ended up not saying goodbye proper to the friends I was staying with. It ended up being a blessing in disguise, though; navigating the Tube took a bit more energy than I expected that early in the morning, and I ended up showing up at Kings Cross with just enough time to grab myself breakfast before my train started boarding.
Dundee
The train ride was fairly uneventful; was sat next to an old man who was polite enough, but didn’t seem to know how to turn the volume down on his phone, and kept scrolling through Facebook autoplay videos. My MP3 player was slowly dying and sitting still for almost 6 hours was a bit agonizing, but I did eventually show up in Dundee and someone I’d only ever seen online showed up to come show me around, so that was pretty neat.
We wandered around central Dundee for an hour or so, got some food, then caught the bus back to her house. It’s a nice place; a little single story bungalo located just far enough outside of town that you couldn’t see anything but farmland. A quiet place for long conversations, which we had plenty. Her parents were wonderful hosts and great to talk to as well; I couldn’t have asked for a better place to stay. We sat and talked about life, about games we liked; we watched soapbox derbies and robots destroying each other on YouTube, talked about memes we’d found and liked. We went wandering around Dundee, walked along the River Tay and saw dozens of jellyfish carried along by the current, cracked jokes at each other. We even found another American, a man from Tennessee who seemed to be enjoying his time around the area and was friendly enough to stop and talk for a while.
It’s a strange thing, meeting people from the Internet for the first time. You see each others’ face, you hear a voice you’ve heard a hundred times, from an ocean away. You know little things about them, their mannerisms, the things they tend to say. It feels familiar. Maybe it even feels friendly. But you’ve only ever seen them from a thousand miles away, the part that they’re comfortable showing off. You don’t really know what they’re like off the screen, not until you meet them. Thankfully, all of the people I met this time around were very true to their on-screen personas, friends in more than just name, and I’m glad to have met them both.
It used to be a big rule that you just shouldn’t trust people from the internet, shouldn’t meet up with them. But that ideology has slipped away recently, a relic of a bygone era where people were afraid of the technology that had come out not even 15 years prior. Turns out that while yes, you should be a bit wary of giving out your information or meeting up with strangers on the internet, not everybody is out to get you. In fact, it’s mostly like real life; most people are just trying to get by and enjoy themselves as they can. It’s not a bad thing to reach out and say hi to people every now and then, take a bit of a risk.
Lake of Mentieth
My time in Dundee drew to a close Wednesday, July 9th; I had a booking down near the Lake of Mentieth, a new rental car, and no properly functional navigation on my phone. I’ll get into the phone in a moment, but the point here is that I had to write down driving instructions on paper and more or less follow them blind to get where I was going. A first for me, for sure. At the same time, it was… kinda fun, admittedly. UK motorways are fairly well marked, and the drivers along the way were relatively polite and didn’t cause me any issues missing a merge or such. Driving on the opposite side of the road again was something I had to get used to (hadn’t done that since I was in Ireland a few years ago), and the roads were certainly more narrow than I was used to, but it all worked out. Had lunch at a farm house about 20 minutes from my destination, and while I was a little lost on the way here, some locals were able to point me to my accommodations about halfway up a mountain.
The view is gorgeous from here; I’m currently sitting on a little porch overlooking the Lake of Mentieth. If I think about it, I’ll add some photos when I get home so you can get an idea. My hosts have been great too; was met by an older gentleman at the gate (shoutout to Ronnie and his thick Glaswegian accent) and he’s been nothing but kind and helpful, offering some advice on where to go and what to see. Every Scottish person I’ve met has been extremely helpful and friendly, honestly. I’m not sure if it’s some cultural phenomenon of the area or if it’s just due to being in some relatively rural areas and having access to some semblance of a social safety net. They make me feel at home, and don’t seem to mind talking your ear off about whatever happens to come to mind. I’ve only had a few issues with not being able to understand someone’s accent thankfully, one of which involved a gentleman with no front teeth sitting on a bus. I can’t think of a better place to spend some time traveling.
There’s a Golden Retriever here too, an old dog by the name of Bertie. Friendly and food-motivated, as most Goldens are. He’s actually sitting next to me as I type this, seems like he wants to play when he’s not patrolling the property. It’s been a while since I’ve had a dog around for more than a few minutes, honestly. It makes me miss my old dog, even though she’s been gone for… 7 years now? Time flies.
Admittedly, I didn’t have much time to research what to do here. Maybe that’s for the best, though; I’d been in such a flurry with travel the past few weeks I was exhausted, and when I arrived in Scotland allergies started to take some hold on me. They got really bad yesterday, so I just went down to town and did some tourist things, got breakfast, and came back up here to start messing with blog site layout and such. I even stopped by the local grocery co-op and bought some stuff to make a very simple Italian meal; red sauce and sausage with penne pasta. If I was home and made something so simple with so little spice I’d admittedly be a little disappointed in myself, but I’m on vacation, and this is my first time cooking on vacation. I didn’t do bad considering I had to source everything myself in an unfamiliar place. Took a nap, had a walk around the fields surrounding the property. Just a nice, solid rest day with a gorgeous view.
While it’s true having temps in the mid-high 20s or low 30s Celsius is absolutely not what Scots are used to or built their houses to deal with, I kinda thrive in this weather. It’s just cool enough I don’t feel a need to hide inside, and am comfortable going out adventuring. If my allergies or the midges (tiny mosquito-like insects; they bite, but don’t do any harm otherwise) hadn’t deterred me, I’d likely have gotten out hiking a bit more. i consider myself lucky the sun and the heat tend to follow me everywhere I go, much to the chagrin of most of the other people in the area.
Today, I did a bit of a wander, and tried to catch the ferry out to Inchmahome Priory, a ruin on an island in the middle of the Lake of Mentieth; I can see it from my porch right now. Unfortunately, they were booked full by the time I showed up today, so I took a bit of a drive around and did the Three Lochs Forest Drive to get a few pictures. Nothing I’d consider absolutely stunning came up in my photos, but the scenery was absolutely phenomenal, as it’s been since I got here. And in a few hours, I’ll be heading to bed, then packing up to head home on a long set of flights tomorrow.
Admittedly, I’m looking forward to being home, despite how incredible this has all been. Any major event needs time to sink in; I didn’t get a chance to sit down and let out all my emotions about ESA until a couple days ago when I had a moment to myself after over a week. I could use some time to relax and just exist, and while the past day or two has been good for that, I’ve also just missed my home, my family, the comfort of being in a familiar place. I’m very glad to have done this trip, and would absolutely do it again, but it’s time to go home.
The Humble Flip Phone Review
While I’ve got a moment, the phone. I’ve been using a burner phone since I left the states, as I didn’t want to take my phone out of the country for various reasons. It’s a Kyocera 902kc, a flip phone from 2019 running Android 8, unable to be upgraded. I figured I’d just use some temp travel SIMS while I’m out and about, and it… kinda worked? Airport WiFi absolutely hated my phone; I’m not sure if it’s because it couldn’t properly give me a network login screen via browser or if it just thought the phone was a joke or some sort of hacking device, but it wouldn’t stay connected, which caused me a bit of stress. And data requires some manual setup per carrier since it doesn’t fill in some info automatically. Admittedly, I didn’t have time to set things up properly when I was at ESA, so I effectively just had calling and had to use data when I was in the hotel. The screen is tiny. You can’t use anything involving Google Services including the Play Store, because the phone won’t accept Google Services. The phone doesn’t work with Android Auto as it’s been arbitrarily declared too old by Google for the protocol.
But… well, since it ran Android, I could sideload apps and get other APK installers on it. It runs Discord, for fuck’s sake. It’s got a shitty camera that actually gives some old mid-2000s digital camera vibes that are immaculate in the right conditions. It can read QR codes. I can browse the web with it, and after struggling a little to find my accommodations I found that an app called Maps that runs off of OpenStreetMap works a lot better than a Google Maps web viewer, and since it works offline I don’t have to worry about losing cell connection and finding maps just stop working, even if I can’t find a GPS view. Learning how to type on a T9 keyboard has been great; I never got to do it when I was younger, my first phone had a slide-out full keyboard.
There’s something important here, though; the past few years I’ve been working on mindfulness with my technology. I’ve realized that social media and computers and such have eaten up so much of my free time that it leaves me miserable and tired, disconnected with the world around me. I’ve been narrowing down my social media, reducing my online presence to a precious few platforms and even more recently trying to pull back further, to personal websites like this one. Even when I’ve been on social media sites, I’ve often found myself logging out of them when I’m done, to avoid idlely tapping on the app and getting sucked into another scroll. I’ve been setting my phone aside when working on projects so I can focus. I’ve bought a dedicated MP3 player so that I’m not enticed to scroll when I’m listening to music. In some ways, technology has become too easy, too convienient, to use, alongside being addicting to our little monkey brains. So I’ve been making it more of a hassle to use technology.
This phone is a part of that idea. This was a sort of test-run for this idea, admittedly; working Discord on this phone is difficult, it takes time to boot and time to type a message. Browsing the web or most apps is an extremely unpleasant experience. But I can call people. I can text, and look at Discord, and maybe pull up a website if I absolutely need to. It could run DOOM if I wanted it to (and it will). And honestly, that’s enough for me. It’s helped keep me off my phone the past 2 weeks and focusing on what matters.
There were other little benefits, too. I liked the small form factor. I like how easy it is to pry the thing open and pull the battery/sim card out. As I mentioned, the camera, while objectively shit, is still great at providing a specific mood. The outer OLED screen tells me the time, battery, cell connection, and even amount of steps I’ve walked without having to open up the phone. Even the aesthetics are fun; being able to close a flip-phone one handed has gone from being old to being fascinating again, a retro marvel that draws peoples’ attention. The sleek silver clamshell case feels like it’s pulled from the early 2000s.
In fact, the ridiculous display of a flip phone running Discord was so eye-catching that it ended up being a bit of a thing at ESA. I even talked to someone else who ended up buying their own while the event was running, and is getting it set up as I type this. I got so many comments on it the first few days it felt like I was getting one every hour, and the flip phone selfies and photos were a favorite at the event. I talked with my friend and he suggested I learn how to speedrun a game on it and submit it to ESA next year, and… well, that’s quite tempting. DOOM runs quite well on this thing, to nobody’s surprise.
I don’t know if I’ll get a separate SIM card for this phone when I get back, but it’s tempting. A question for another time. And I’m not afraid of bringing the phone to other countries anymore. It’s proven itself fully capable.
Conclusion
This trip has been a lot of things. It’s been an incredible time meeting friends, both old and new, from the internet and ones I’ve met before. I’ve gotten to see things I never would have guessed I’d see, travel a country alone for a week and remember what it’s like to just go on an adventure, take a risk, find new experiences that I’ll never forget. I’ve got likely over 2000 pictures from the past couple weeks to send to people as reminders and gifts. I feel like I found some ancient, long-dormant love that’s sitting inside me again; the kind of love that gets lost amid the daily monotony of a full time job that hardens your heart and makes you forget who you are. I needed these last few weeks, and if you’ve taken a part in them at all, you’re to thank for them.
So… what’s next? Well, this is my only big personal trip for the year; I try to do one every year at least. Next year? I’ve had a friend invite me to go to Vietnam for two weeks, though I may have to slash that time some in order to fit in another ESA trip given my current PTO is only about 2 weeks for a year. I’ve got some smaller personal trips, to see girlfriends mostly, and may be able to sneak a trip or two in for a holiday weekend in the latter half of the year. The primary thing I’m doing this year is taking some time for my damn self. I’m starting a Pathfinder campaign with some friends when I get home. I’ve got an old record player and amplifier to fix (I’ll likely make a post on those later). I’ve got relationships to tend to, friends to meet, photos to edit. Speedruns to learn, now. Life’s always busy, and I’m glad for it. But it was nice to take some time away from everything and just focus on the stuff that matters: friends and remembering how full of love and amazing experiences life is.