slowly she turned

Wednesday was mostly a rest day. We both slept a lot and I slipped out around mid-day to let Sandy sleep and explore a little bit. I went downstairs to the coffee shop where I explained what was going on with us to the manager (there was a lot of blood in the room), and she bought me a cup of coffee. I took a cheese scone up to Sandy, but neither of us could really eat. I had to sit on the floor to eat and Sandy could hardly sit up in bed.

I booked a room for that night at a “normal” hotel that said it had wheelchair accessible rooms. I canceled our bus tour that was toward the end of our stay, and contacted our tour manager for the Highlands train tour to get his feedback and to say that we might have to cancel.

After a quick trip to the closest grocery to get bandages, antiseptic cream, and ibuprofen, I headed to Dovecot Tapestry Studios, a short walk away and an item on my bucket list. I wanted to go there more than any other place in Edinburgh. I ended up getting there after the gallery to see the tapestry studio had closed. I had already seen the Chris Ofili exhibition in London when we went to the National Gallery in 2017, so I wandered about the cafe and looked at the small tapestries on the walls there, and picked up a few things in the gift shop, including a book about Archie Brennan. I told the staff at the desk that I had studied under Archie, and why I probably could not come back when the gallery was open. They made a call and escorted me up to the gallery so I could see the tapestry weavers at work and the exhibition around the balcony walls.

Here are some photos from Dovecot. Click to see the enlarged photo.

Here is a gallery of the small tapestries in the cafe area of Dovecot. Click to see the enlarged photo with the artists’ names and titles.

Around 5 p.m. we took a taxi to a Leonardo hotel near Haymarket, where we had dinner in the hotel restaurant. The room was comfortable and had plenty of space to maneuver, but had a bathtub. When I asked, they said all their rooms, including wheelchair accessible rooms, had bathtubs. Because Sandy’s leg strength is compromised by polymyositis and he depends on his hands to keep him steady, he had to bathe at the sink again. Don’t think I mentioned that he broke his dominant arm? He couldn’t stand the pain of it being touched, and he was wobbly.

That’s okay, we would head to another hotel the next day. He was going to give it one more day to decide whether to go on the tour or go home. He was a real trooper!