Sunday 13th July to Monday 14th July - New York to Edinburgh and ChapelHope Farm

 

Sunday 13th July – New York to Edinburgh to St. Mary’s Loch


JetBlue flight No. 73

Today was the day when we had to catch our JetBlue flight 73 from JFK Airport to Edinburgh at 9:35 at night. We spent most of the day just getting everybody packed and the house ready for a long holiday.


Because JFK is in the process of rebuilding all its access roadways and parking areas, Ian had decide to leave his car at a long term parking lot and catch their shuttle into the airport.


I couldn’t believe the number of people in the airport all queuing up to check in and then get their drop-off bags processed – it was sort of organised chaos and took ages. When we did finally get through Ian and Kristy decided that it would be a good idea to have something to eat and found a nice little pizza shop in airport. I wasn’t really concerned about eating as I was pretty sure that we would get a dinner on the plane, but things brightened up when I discovered that the shop had cans of Guinness. I had just that and was happy!


Ian suggested that I upgrade to a Premium Economy seat as it was a six and a half hour flight to Edinburgh and I would be more comfortable, so I did.


Edinburgh Airport and Avis Car Rental


We landed at 9:00 am Monday 14th July on a rainy morning – haven’t seen much rain for two weeks. After we had collected our bags from the carousel we had a long trek in the rain to the Rental Car area. I found the Avis section and Ian went to Enterprise. There were a lot of people queuing up for cars at every car rental so t took quite a while to get to the counter. I had a nice Jamaican with a Scottish accent sort me out. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it was a Mercedes Benz:




 It was a fairly late model car so I had to get one of the staff to come and give me a run-down on how to make it go. 

Ian’s queue was moving very slowly so he suggested that I just go ahead off to St. Mary’s Loch on my own. I had hoped to travel in convoy so that if I had issues finding the place I would have somebody to fall back on, but I really didn’t want to wait around any longer, so off I went rather nervously, as I wasn’t very confident about how all the technology in the car worked.


St. Mary’s Loch – Chapelhope Farm House


I had a pretty uneventful trip down to St. Mary’s Loch, except that when I got to the place designated by the postcode TD7 5LJ it was just a farm gate and a big blue rubbish bin. I rang Ian ,who was in Innerleithen buying groceries, and arranged to meet him at The Gordon Arms Hotel not far off. I had a good chat to a truck driver while I waited.

Ian arrived, and after quite a bit of discussion about where exactly the house was we set off feeling pretty sure that this time we knew where we were going, and sure enough after a bit of a drive we found the place down the A708. Here is the ChapelHope Farm gate



It is a lovely old farmhouse with great big rooms, high ceilings, three bathrooms, lovely watercolour paintings and a four-door Aga stove in the kitchen already pretty warmed up.



We got all our stuff unloaded, took some photographs and waited for James, Julia and Eliza to turn up from their drive up from Heathrow at 5:30.

It was a really great feeling to be able to sit down to a family dinner that evening



Comments

  1. Kate Corfield18 July 2025 at 18:02

    A beautiful story. Congrats for your smooth running into Scotland, great pics, keep it up. Terence

    ReplyDelete

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