As we boarded the bus in Portree, I wasn’t sure how I felt.  I had never been off my island, and now I was going to Glasgow!.  Well, to be perfectly honest, I was terrified.  And I couldn’t wait.  And so I boarded that Stagecoach bus with a little plastic card in the lower passenger side of the front window saying Glasgow.  As I’m short and it was my first time leaving the island, Kate gave me the window seat.  And she promptly fell asleep.  Well, we had woken up at 5am.  Her mouth was open a bit, but she didn’t snore or anything.  We drove to the bridge along a familiar road.  There are few roads on my island, and so in 16 years you get pretty familiar with all of them.  I tried feeling sad.  I cried a little bit.  I had my nose glued to the window, and as we got to the bridge I woke Kate up.

“The bridge, the bridge, look, look!!!”

“Huh?” said a sleepy Kate.  But she did open her eyes and turned to the window.  I know there are longer and more beautiful bridges.  This one wasn’t even a suspension bridge or anything.  But as we crossed I felt like I could smell the change.  The air over the water smelled different.  I was disappointed.  The small town on the other side didn’t look that different at all.  Some people got off the bus and some new ones got on.  I wanted to know where all of them were going.  Which ones were going home, which ones were going to visit family, which ones were like me and going to Glasgow for the first time in their lives.  Half an hour later it hit me, and I started to sob.  Kate, who had not gone back to sleep put her arm around me, and sat, waiting for me to finish.

“Do you want to tell me?” she asked when I had calmed down?

“I just realized I’m leaving home, and it’s not going to be the same.  What if I don’t ever go back?  What if something happens to my family when I’m gone?  What if I can’t do it because I miss home too much?”

“You can do anything you want,” replied Kate.  “But I know how you feel.  I think that one of the things about traveling is that the best parts are amazing, but there are also times when you say, ‘what am I doing?’  It will pass, although it will come back sometimes.  You will change, and you may never be able to go back to your old life and be happy, but you want to miss the world because you were afraid of change?  Your family will always love you.”

“What was it like when you started?”  I asked.

“I left the US with only a plan for my first night.  In fact, I had an address, but I didn’t know how to get there, I only knew it was near Oxford.  I didn’t think about it before I left, I just left.  I was so tired after landing in London, that I took all my energy and focused it on getting to the small village of Eynsham.  It was my first time on my own, and somehow I made my way out of the airport, found a bus to Oxford, found a bus from Oxford to Eynsham and made my way to the old church, home of my mother’s very old friend Margaret.  She fed me, but then she had to leave for a funeral, and I went into town and sat at the Borders bookstore reading The Golden Compass until it closed at 11 at night.  Back at Margaret’s house I found a note from my mum in my bag, along with Valentine’s Day chocolate (I left February 11) and cried myself to sleep.  I had never felt so alone in my life.”

“Did it get better?”

“It slowly got better.  I started to explore.  I met nice people.  Ate good food.  Saw beautiful places.  Occasionally I would miss home a lot, sometimes I still do, but mostly I lived in the moment, and was extraordinarily happy.”

“And when you got home?”

“Chapel Hill, North Carolina seemed really small.  I couldn’t quite fit myself back into university knowing how much bigger the world was.  But at the same time it was wonderful to see my family and friends again.  And after I finished I left again to travel and work abroad.”

I turned back to the window.  Everything was new!  I wished I could open the window so I could smell the air here.  Hear the birds here.  Feel the wind.  But the windows didn’t open.

A couple hours later we entered Glasgow.  The outskirts.  The houses went on and on and on.  Then they became buildings that were more than two stories.  The tallest building I had ever seen in my life!  It had three rows of windows!  There were even buildings with five rows, six rows!  Kate told me each row was a floor!!  What a lot of people in each building.  I just sat there imagining all those smells, all those sounds!  How many mice could live in a building that big?

The noise – I could hear it even though the windows.  There were so many cars, and then as we entered the city center there were more and more people walking and so many neon lights.  Neon lights – In Portree only a few stores have them.  Here, they were everywhere.  So much activity.  When we came to the bus station it was in the busiest area we had seen yet.  We got off the bus and got our bags.  And then we had to exit the bus station.  And the noise and the smell and the feel of thousands of people hit me all at once like a wave and I stopped.  I couldn’t move.  For an instant I panicked.  I hadn’t counted on this.  Hadn’t even thought this many people could live in a place.  For all my life I had known all my neighbors.  In one minute I had seen five times that many people.  But I took a deep breath.  I had made it off my island, and I was going to see the biggest city in Scotland and then I was going to see other countries.  I could do this!!!

And we began walking.  The smells!!  There were so many food smells.  Then there was the smell of people.  People wearing perfume.  People who had not taken a shower and obviously needed one.  People smelling like food.   People just smelling clean.  People smelling like cats, or dogs.  People smelling of buildings and people smelling of the outdoors.  And the animals.  Cats and mice and dogs and insects and squirrels and hedgehogs.  They all live in Glasgow, but I bet you’ve never noticed them.  And the smell of trash and the smell of cars, and the smell of busses, and rubber, and roads.  And then the food smells.  I was hungry.  We hadn’t eaten anything since we left the island.

We were headed for Kate’s friend Daniel’s house.  She had met him on the West Highland Way, and they had hiked together for a day.  He was heading back to the US in a couple of weeks, but he had said we could stay with him.  Kate called him and he told us to meet him at the Kelvengrove Bridge metro stop.  Metro?  I had read about the metro.  In my books people in London are always riding the underground.  But me?  We went down some stairs and then bought our tickets from a man in a little booth with a glass window.  There were more stairs and then we waited on the platform.  We were in a big tunnel.  It was weird to be that far below ground.  I guess thousands, or maybe millions of people had ridden this metro before, so it probably wasn’t going to fall on my head.  But still, it was weird.  People kept entering the platform, and by the time the train arrived it was really crowded, and we all rushed on.  People were packed in, sitting on the seats, holding onto the rails, leaning against each other-Kate could hardly move!  We ended up having to stand up, wearing our ruck sacks.  It wasn’t that far.  Then it was our turn to try to get off as people started rushing onto the train.  I thought I was going to get stepped on.  And it was so crowded I thought Kate might not make it off.  But then the train sped away and we were left on the platform.  Waiting a few minutes for everyone to clear we found the exit.  We took these moving stairs – an escalator Kate told me, and so super cool!  I really just wanted to ride it hours and then see if I could run down to the bottom while it was going up – up to the Kelvingrove Bridge where we stood, waiting for Daniel.