Student Bloggers

The next instance of “disaster” that seemed to be controlled by the rules of Murphy’s Law happened on my first trip to Inverness. A group of friends and I decided to go to Inverness and Loch Ness on one of the first weekends we had in Aberdeen. The bus ride there is about 4 hours, and the bus from Inverness to Loch Ness is about 20 min. With the limited number of busses going to the area, we were set to get there at about 2:00. However, about 1 hour into our initial bus ride, the bus pulled to the side of the road. After about 20 minutes of sitting there unsure of what was wrong, it finally came to light that the windshield wipers on the bus were broken, and it had started to snow, so it was dangerous to keep driving. We ended up waiting about another hour for the next bus in that direction, and switched onto it. After finally arriving in Inverness, we only had about an hour and a half to two hours of light left in the day, because that was when it was still getting dark around 4:30-5:00 in the evening. We all decided that it would still be worth it to go to Loch Ness, seeing as we went all the way there. Luckily, Urquhart Castle is one of the sites that I get into for free with my Historic Scotland card I got from Arcadia. The castle was beautiful with snow all over it, and I am very glad we went out there, because it was spectacular. (For photos of this, refer to my previous blog post about the trip.)

After looking around the castle, we were all waiting in the parking lot for the bus back to Inverness to arrive. Unfortunately, we had to wait about 40 minutes for the bus, because they don’t run very often. Night was beginning to fall, and the temperature was quite low. Where we were standing for the bus was in a parking lot below the road, so we could not flag down the bus, it had to pull down into the parking lot to see to pick us up. We saw our bus up on the road above us, and got very excited, because it was getting very cold standing out there. The bus slowed down, put its blinker on… and then just kept going. Because it was dark, the bus driver could not see us from the road, so he should have pulled down into the parking lot no matter if he thought he saw people or not. But for whatever reason, this particular bus driver decided that because he “didn’t see any people” he could just keep on going. All of our hearts collectively dropped. Our bus just left us! It was dark, there was no one around, and there was absolutely no way we could walk back on the twisty, two-lane road back to Inverness. 

What ended up happening is that the only number my phone had enough service to call was the non-urgent emergency number. They couldn’t call us a cab, so they had to connect us with the police. The police called us a cab, and it eventually came to get us, after a significant amount of waiting. You would think getting a call for a cab from the police would make a person hurry, but you’d be surprised. The moral of the story here is that we all worked together to solve the problem, and eventually got ourselves back safe and sound, but slightly frozen. This made me reflect on how this experience, and my experience on the way to Scotland were great learning experiences for the rest of my time abroad, especially when travelling. So here is my short list of what to do when Murphy’s Law hits you: 

• Stay calm! It is almost guaranteed that things are not as bad as they seem.
• Think logically about how to best handle the situation.
• Be confident that things are going to be okay when handling the situation.
• ASK FOR HELP!
• Take a breath if you need to in order to feel like you can talk to someone for help.
• Don’t be afraid of looking like an idiot, or an inexperienced traveller for messing up, or being frazzled when things go wrong.
• Be persistent if the problem isn’t handled right away.
• Realize that no matter what, there is always a way to fix any problematic situation.
• Don’t take things too seriously when they go wrong- comedy can be found in basically any bad situation.

Hopefully no one else has to go through what I did, but after reading this, just remember that everything will work out in the end. Happy Easter from Scotland!