Kit and Frances are back in Chattanooga after what we believe was a successful three week College Cooperative for Study Abroad (CCSA) adventure in Scotland. We arrived home Saturday morning about 2:30 after an challenging 24-hour-plus trip via Continental Airlines from Edinburgh through Newark, to Atlanta, and then UTC provided van ride from Atlanta to Chattanooga. The trip home was an adventure. The returning home adventure(s) primarily were delays, cancelled flights for a few of the students, and the long, long day - that included the five hour jump from Greenwich Mean to Eastern Daylight.

Our trip, the academic course, the experience were successful. The beauty of Scotland is something one must see rather than try to describe in words. Trying to describe the drama, the expanse, the colour of the Highlands, is an impossible task. The villages along the route from Edinburgh through St. Andrews, Pitlockry, Oban, Inverness are picturesque, and so Scottish. The people we met were uniformly hospitable, helpful, and tolerant of our group - both as a group and as individuals.

The exposure to the history and culture of the country had a profound impact on our students and on us. The comments recorded in the daily student journals indicate the young people will long remember their experiences, and they are aware now, too, of the importance to the world of Scotland and the Scots - and especially the consequences of the Scottish Enlightenment and the Scottish diaspora.

Frances and I spent our "free" weekend in Inverness, and the weekend was for us, personally, a highlight of the trip. The oppressive sadness of the Culloden battlefield and memorial, the beauty and mystery of Loch Ness coupled with the beauty of the the little city on the banks of the River Ness and the delightful bed and breakfast in which we stayed made that weekend especially memorable.

I have only three regrets about our three weeks in Scotland - the first is that we had to miss the Memphis Central Class of 1963 reunion, the second is that I did not tour even one distillery, and the third is that Frances and I did not make it to the top of Arthur's Seat. We did "climb" Edinburgh's Calton Hill, we did spend an afternoon in the beautiful Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens, but we did not, during this visit, make it to the top of the venerable Arthur's Seat.

Glasgow was a much, much more successful excursion this trip than the trip two years ago. The students were very much impressed with the Glasgow School of Art. I think the difference in the two years was the group itself and the tour guide. The young second year painting student who served as this visit's tour guide was knowledgeable, open to questions, and patient with our American ignorance of so many things related to art and to Scotland. We followed the tour of the art school with tea at the Willow Tea Room. The students appreciated so much more the Willow Tea Room experience after the tour of the art school.

Our side-trip to Glasgow from Edinburgh was so successful that two or three of the students returned, on their own, to spend another day in the city. One of the young people told Frances he was searching for a "Gay Pride" group about which he'd heard. Another of our group told me that she wanted to visit again the Willow Tea Room and she wanted to tour the Glasgow Botanic Garden, which she did.

My dear Frances and I took almost 5,000 photographs during the three weeks. I'm going to insist that you view each one of them! (That's said, of course, tongue in cheek!) I have posted a relatively small selection from the 5,000 on my revised utc.edu website and I've provided a link to the still being updated trip journals of the students at:

http://www.utc.edu/Faculty/Kit-Rushing/CCSA_Kilt/index.html

There were, in my opinion and in the opinion of my dear Frances, only two real catastrophes - one was the little girl who became so homesick that she returned to the United States about half-way through the adventure (we discovered that she was taking depression and anxiety medication up to a week or so before the trip, and she'd stopped taking the medicine??-- so that may have had some relationship to her homesickness...) The second major catastrophe was my student's loss of his laptop in Hawkshead during our visit to Beatrix Potter's Hilltop Farm.

I strongly believe in the value of study-abroad experiences for college aged young people. If you have an opportunity to encourage children or grandchildren to take advantage of study-abroad programs, do so.

In spite of a very good experience in a very beautiful and friendly country, 'tis still good to be back home in our sunny Southland. We're home!