Day 17 – Scotland to Liverpool

Lockerbie Garden of Remembrance

We said goodbye to Scotland and started our four and a half hour drive south to Liverpool. We try to break up our trips so we stopped to see the Lockerbie Garden of Remembrance. This is a memorial to Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 killing all 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground. Two Libyans were tried for the bombing and one was found guilty and the other found not proven guilty. The “Not Proven Guilty” is a third possible outcome for a trial under Scottish law and one that we don’t have. While it is technically an acquittal, it basically means we know you were guilty but it can’t be proved.

We passed into England and drove though the Lake District, which was the home to poets like Wordsworth. It is very pretty country but with fantastic weather today (sunny and about 70) the small towns were overrun with tourists and so we didn’t stop much.

View of Albert Dock From Our Room

We have a great room at the Hilton in Liverpool overlooking the Albert Dock and the River Mersey. We went to dinner at Albert Dock and saw a show at the comedy club there.  The first three comedians were very funny and we could mostly understand the jokes, except when they made cultural reference to things that we didn’t know like making fun of the people in Hull. No clue what that means.  The last guy was totally different. He was a last minute replacement and a local low-class Liverpudlian whose accent so thick it was amazingly difficult to understand. Some of that difficulty might have been part of his act, but we only understood about 20% of what he was saying. Everyone else was laughing, either with him or at him. It was hard to tell which.