Lately, my most common mid-winter thought is … will this winter never end?!
This winter seems so cold, colder than any other recent winter. There has been more rain than usual, and more wind, more hail, and thunder, and lightning. There hasn’t been much snow, but it has just been so blasted cold and rainy and windy. Just miserable.
Where is spring!?
I decided I needed to get my mind off of this cold weather, so I researched places to go camping a couple of months from now, in April. And I made a camping reservation! Yay! This April I’ll be heading to Cape Disappointment State Park near the mouth of the mighty Columbia River, on the Washington State side, the north side of the Columbia River near the mouth of the Columbia River where it empties into the Pacific Ocean.
Obviously, I may not have weather as nice as in the photos above (both photos borrowed off the internet), but I will keep my fingers crossed.
The campground that I’ll be going to runs north-south along the Pacific Ocean, although the campsites themselves are a safe distance away from the ocean in case of big storms. But my campsite has a view of the Pacific Ocean! How cool is that? My specific campsite doesn’t have electricity or water, but Towhee the Trailer carries plenty of water and she has lots of solar panels and batteries, and I use propane for heat.
In April, it might still be cold and windy out there right next to the Pacific Ocean, but somehow a spring storm out on the Pacific Coast sounds fantastic, whereas here at home storms have become simply tedious. So, later in April, after I get home from this camping trip, look forward to some blog posts about this trip.
Other travel thoughts to distract me from winter woes …
Here at home, I’ve had friends visit recently from Canada. Our talk always seems to include a discussion of the monetary exchange rate between the Canadian dollar and the USA dollar. Not that many years ago, the Canadian dollar was worth more than the USA dollar so Canadians flocked to the USA to buy stuff and save money. Nowadays, it’s the opposite. The USA dollar is worth about 25% more than the Canadian dollar. In fact, that’s one of the reasons I bought a travel trailer built in Canada … and I purchased it directly from the Canadian builder, Escape Trailer Industries, in Chilliwack, British Columbia.
Also, other travel thoughts … a friend of mine and I have been discussing spending a month in Scotland this year (or next year) and of course we’ve been talking about what that might cost. She and I were there 12 years ago and learned to figure out the values of pounds and pence and quid and shillings and ponies and monkeys (really, those are names, or nicknames, for UK money).
In the UK (United Kingdom … or some folks think it’s not-so-united), Scotland has its own currency. There are three banks in Scotland that are allowed to print Scottish currency … Bank of Scotland, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Clydesdale Bank. The Scottish pound is worth exactly the same as the English pound. English money is used regularly in Scotland, but Scotland money (paper money and coins) is often refused by private businesses in England even though it is legal tender in England.
You might ask what would happen to Scottish money and its value if “brexit” does or does not happen, or what would happen if/when Scotland regains independence from England. I’ve researched those questions a bit online and, believe me, there are so many opinions that I stopped researching.
For ease of identification, each denomination of Scottish bank notes (paper money) is a different physical size (people who can’t see well or who can’t see at all, can learn to differentiate denomination by size) and each bank note has a different background color: £5 blue, £10 brown, £20 purple, etc.
While my friend and I were in Scotland, I took photos of some of the bank notes we came across. The photos are here (below), with information about the main image on each bank note (and a link to more information). Many of the bank notes photographed here that we used during our trip in 2007 are now out of print and out of circulation. I brought a good number of the ones we used back home with me to the USA. Time to go back to Scotland and get more!
My apologies for some of the badly focused photos here. I could have downloaded nice, crisp photos from the internet but I thought it more personal to share my own photos with you of the very same, exact money that I/we used while in Scotland.
Lord Ilay, Archibald Campbell
Mary Slessor, Scottish missionary to the Ibibio people in Nigeria.
Map of Calabar in Nigeria, including the location of the Ibibio people. Note the sailing ship in the lower left corner.
Whisky stills in a Scottish distillery. Scotch whisky is spelled without an “e” … it’s not whiskey, it is whisky … and it’s not “Scotch”! If you are in Scotland and order “Scotch” in a pub, you will not be served, you may well be completely ignored. The beverage is called simply whisky, the breath of the land!
Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, led Scotland to victory over the English army at the Battle of Bannockburn.
Education and research. The images on the right side of the bank note above are, from top to bottom: the Scottish Thistle, the national flower of Scotland; Pallas, the goddess of weaving, surmounted by the Latin motto “Ditat” (“she enriches”); the saltire cross (the large white X) and gold bezants (dots) which form part of Bank of Scotland’s coat of arms; a ship in full sail taken from the Union Bank of Scotland’s coat of arms. The thistle, Scotland’s national emblem, is in the upper left corner.
Education in Scotland has a long, important history. Guaranteed, free, basic education to all children in Scotland, no matter how small the village or remote the home or farm, has been a basic part of Scottish life and infrastructure long before it became such in England … and was put into practice in Scotland prior to such education in almost every other country in the world. Originally, all Bibles were written (and read) in Latin. The Roman Catholic church had forbidden teaching Latin to anyone other than priests and nuns, so only Roman Catholic priests and nuns could read (and interpret!) the Bible. The Scottish people reacted to that by establishing one of the earliest and best systems of education in the world, by distributing English translations of the Bible to all people in Scotland, and by establishing free schooling for every Scottish child. Scotland enjoyed the highest literacy rate of any country in the world for hundreds of years. Scotland still enjoys a 99% literacy rate, higher than the literacy rate in the USA.
So … all this talk of money and history and education and whisky sure has been a great distraction for me from this miserable winter weather. In fact, as I’m typing this, I just looked out my window to find NO wind, NO rain, and bright glorious sunshine. I think this blog post did the trick! 🙂
Do you have stories about money or education from “other” countries (I’m from the USA obviously) … or do you have interesting information about your own country? I’d love to hear all about it.