DAY FOURTEEN: LEITH, ETC.

When I was 23 years old, one year out of college and no closer to figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, I packed up my car one day and moved to Seattle.  When I got there, I moved into a very hip and seedy downtown apartment and commenced what would've been the romantic artist period of my life, were I creating any art at all, but sometimes, when I wasn't walking around in a leather jacket or hanging out in a bar, brooding, I'd get homesick for Orange County, so I'd drive to Bellevue and walk around the mall.  It always  made me feel better.

Creepy.

Well, today I walked around in a mall, but not because I was homesick.  There was nothing about the mall in Leith that would've cured homesickness, save for the GAP's always reliable 40 percent off sale and certainly not the tidal wave of unease unleashed by the mini-Oor Willie statue display whose aggregate creepiness reached peak Johnny Depp-as-Willie Wonka levels. No, this time I went for a much simpler reason: I had to go to the bathroom. 

See, today was my solo day, and on my solo day I did what I always do on my solo day: I walked.  I may not have a PhD, in anything useful, and actually do have a pair of Masters degrees that aren't worth the sheepskin they're printed on, but I know one thing and that's how to walk around a city.  Part of that is knowing how to solve the "I have to go to the bathroom" problem.

Why was I alone today?  Because I ditched the Sandra Bullocks' trip to their ancestral homeland, Moffat.  I was on board at first, but the more I thought about it the more I thought, "Hey, this sounds like a great mother-daughter trip, sans the non-Moffat member of the traveling party."  When it turned out the driver S. Bullock hired (uncharacteristically without checking references or ratings) was also female, that clinched it.  Theirs was to be a Moffat-centric, girlpower kind of day with excitement running high after it was revealed that Moffats had fought alongside William Wallace, who was never, by the way, nicknamed "Braveheart." My day would involve lots of steps. 

Back to the bathroom question.  There are a few things I've learned since that first time I left the youth hostel in Sydney in 1987 and embarked on an all-day walk.  One is that you always cross with the lights -- no mean feat here in the U.K., where the crosswalk signals fail to follow what I thought were the unchangeable rules of crosswalk physics.  You stand there and watch -- by now I've trained myself to look in the correct direction at least 73 percent of the time -- and watch and watch and the light changes but the little green person on the sign never appears.  Everyone just stands there.  Or they jaywalk, but there's no pattern to when they jaywalk and when they stand.  At first I tried to copy them, of course, because when I'm in a strange land I have no personality of my own, only what's reflected off of those around me, but today I got bold.  I walked when I wanted to walk, and only almost got hit twice. 

But I digress.  Here's the deal with bathrooms: the savvy city hiker knows that there are three places where you can always use the bathroom.  Actually, two that always work and one that works about 80 percent of the time.  Hotel lobbies, especially when the hotel is large (300 or more rooms) and at least three stars, can be very useful, but you do run the risk of having an obsequious desk clerk as if he or she "can help you."  It seems innocuous when you write it down, but in person it's a straight shot to meltdown, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.  If you have any doubt at all that you can slip past the desk clerk, do not use the hotel options.

The library option, however, is completely failsafe and equally relevant for road trips.  Shoutout to the Roseburg, Oregon public library, a must-stop for anyone over 50 road-tripping up I-5 from San Francisco to Seattle.

This leaves us with the mall.  You can count on the mall.  Maybe not the most sanitary option, but reliably anonymous.  You're in and out and no one is the wiser.  Nobody's going to look sideways at you because you came right in off the street and didn't buy anything but instead made a beeline for the facilities.  If you're in San Francisco, in fact, odds are overwhelmingly good that you'll encounter at least three people in the mall bathroom who are far more suspicious than you. 

Today's mall in question was a waterfront monster in Leith, a neighborhood I visited today after reading glowing reviews of it in my guide books: 

Edinburgh’s exciting new waterfront development and boasting the award-winning Royal Yacht Britannia. Discover the shops, restaurants and galleries in the popular shore area of Leith! -- Edinburgh.org

Located about two miles from our AirBnB in Stockbridge, I figured Leith would be a good first goal -- get 5,000 or so steps in, listen to a podcast, maybe see some sights.  And the walk there wasn't bad -- it just wasn't very interesting.  One long road, promisingly named "The Leith Walk," lined with minimarkets and hair salons.  I wanted to see "real" Edinburgh; here it was.  The podcast was good, at least.  And surely greatness awaited me at Leith, or at least another Quadrophenia-style U.K. beach.  

Or maybe not.  Sure, sure, I appreciated the whole "we used to be a run-down port but we're working on it!" vibe, and I did peek into the windows of Martin Wishart, the Michelin star restaurant I thought I'd made reservations at for last night, instead of the perfectly fine but nowhere near Michelin star-rated David Bann, where the meat-free menu pushed S. Bullock Sr. to abandon her "whatever you guys want is fine" ethos and sigh, after a meal of soba noodles and tofu, "Can we eat somewhere tomorrow that has meat on the menu?"

(As it turns out, I DID make reservations at Martin Wishart, but not for last night.  For Wednesday.  And they have meat.)

It's just that, well, Leith promised me a waterfront.  It bragged about its waterfront.  It is the up-and-coming waterfront village in Edinburgh.  I gave it every chance to have a waterfront.

What it has is a sort of river/canal and a bunch of pubs and restaurants with tables out front, all the better to take in the view.  And it's got a lot of development, because somebody decided a few years ago that people craved waterfront condos in Edinburgh and this is as close as they're going to get.  Also: restaurants. 

And there's some plaques hanging around that show a map of the area and point out historic stuff and buildings.  So they're working on it.  Right now, though, I'm looking for more of a high-impact "waterfront" than the one they have, which is only slightly more significant than the "waterfront" in Scottsdale, Arizona. 

What they also have is a bunch of ships and cranes and warehouses, indicating that somewhere out there is a real waterfront, only it's the kind where stuff is loaded off of barges that came from Japan.  There is an Ocean Drive.  I walked it, hopefully that it would someday intersect with the ocean.  Instead, it intersected with the more pragmatic and truthful Stevedore Drive.

By this time I'd given up on the waterfront paradise I sought.  Instead, I turned my attention to the bathroom question.  Where was the nearest bathroom that wouldn't require buying something, like a beer?  It was too early for a beer and besides, today was a talking day not a beer day.  Until later.

The mall rose out of the faux waterfront like, well, like a mall.  Inside: bathrooms.  And creepy Oor Willie statues. 

Moody, but inspiring.

Afterward, still not satisfied, I kept walking north because my map showed to road coming very close to the water about a mile away.  I left Leith, which was less the Brighton Beach I'd imagined and more the San Pedro I was seeing, and went on until I arrived in Newhaven Harbour.  There, inspired by its sad history, its marina with its weather-beaten boats (half of them beached at low tide), its wind-whipped lighthouse and a moody, low sky I realized that the problem wasn't Leith.  It was me.

I've been walking through cities for 30 years.  During that time I've gone through all kinds of neighborhoods and never once did I find the less glossy neighborhoods any less, uh, compelling than the high-profile ones.  I've enjoyed the streets of Dayton, Ohio every bit as much as I've enjoyed New York and once spent almost an entire day imagining the stories of the people living in the houses in Bishop, CA.  And now I can't mange to appreciate Leith?  No, Leith wasn't the problem.

Urban renewal of the worst kind.

I took off my headphones and walked through Newhaven's tiny Main Street, which had once bustled -- for more than 400 years -- before declining and falling victim to the brutal urban renewal of the 1960s.  When I reached the end of the street I turned off Google Maps and put my headphones back on.  No podcast this time, though.  Instead I thought hard about music... what would be appropriate?  What would put me back in that frame of mind I had in 1987, when my appetite for seeing a new city was so overwhelming that it couldn't be satisfied in just one day.

I wanted something Scottish, but couldn't think of any appropriate Scottish rock bands, even after Googling.  The only one I could think of was the Jesus & Mary Chain, and I'm not even sure they're from Scotland but they are from 1987 so they worked fine.

The rest of the walk passed in an eager blur.  I saw the suburbs and the city.  I relished all of the cars I can't see at home, the Citroens, the Vauxhalls, the Dacias and the Audi Q2s, and the greatest vehicular crime against humanity, the unimported 1991 Nissan Figaro.  I even saw a Smart Car that looked cool, if you an believe it.  I can't.  

How people live in Edinburgh.

By the time I made it back to the house, my faith in myself was restored.  I'd covered more than 13 miles but more importantly, I'd finally seen the Edinburgh we'd missed by walking a well-worn bath through Stockbridge, back to Old Edinburgh day after day.  I'd seen how people live, learned somethings about the city and pretty much sweated through one of my favorite t-shirts.  I even made it to the cheese shop to restock our supply, which is good because my circulatory system is very confused after almost making it through an entire day without its daily infusion of cheese. 

 Here are some numbers for you: 

0 -- days remaining to save the Leith Walk Cafe, per the large sign tacked up next to its shuttered windows.

20 million -- number of oysters pulled from Newhaven Harbour in 1835.

45 -- wind speed, in miles per hour, at the Newhaven lighthouse, while I stood and took a picture.

12 -- number of boats beached in the mud during low tide.

1 -- golf courses spotted during today's walk.

2 -- number of times a cashier offered, after watching me painstakingly try to figure out which coins were worth what, to charge me less than their register said.  

2.45 -- total savings, in pounds sterling, if I'd let them charge me less.  I made them stand there and wait while I fumbled around.  Hey, I'm no charity case.

Gotta wrap this up now.  The Bullocks are on their way back and I've got to find someplace for us to have dinner that has meat on the menu.