St. Andrew's Day in St. Andrews

November 30th was St. Andrew's Day, which is Scotland's national day. To celebrate, Historic Scotland (who runs the historical sites around Scotland) gave free admission to its sites. I decided to take advantage of the offer and check out the cathedral and castle in St. Andrews (because, really, where else would you go to spend St. Andrew's Day?). I just went for the day and really enjoyed the town. If I wanted to get away somewhere for 3 or 4 days just to chill, I would go to St. Andrews. It has a great main street and a fabulous beach that you can walk along forever.

St. Andrews Cathedral

 I wandered around the cathedral ruins and the castle ruins (where I learned that castles were not only built for royalty but also to protect religious leaders) and then headed out to the west sands to go for a walk on the beach. On my way to the West Sands, I passed the golf museum. I'm not a huge golf fan (or really any sort of golf fan) but entry to the museum was free for St. Andrew's day so I went in and completely surprised myself by finding it interesting! I learned about how golf balls have been made throughout time and about the evolution of golf clubs. I was fascinated except for some other stuff in there about famous golfers and who won what (i.e. the other 85% of the museum content).

The West Sands

St. Andrews is a great town and I'd like to go back but I have to admit that my favorite part of the day (other than actually finding the golf museum interesting) was the bus ride back to Edinburgh. I'd been noticing that when I go places on weekends, I always feel slightly disappointed when my train/bus actually gets to its destination. I realized that it was because on the train/bus, I didn't have to do anything like figure out where to go or what to do - I was free to just sit there and do nothing. The bus ride back from St. Andrews was even better because it was two hours long and it was dark outside, which meant that I didn't even feel like I should be paying attention to the scenery. I just put my earphones in and sat there listening to music. The perfect ending to a great day.



St. Andrews