Aa an author I guess you will always be looking for new ideas - and don’t they always hit you when you least expect them?
Glad you enjoyed exploring Edinburgh. I expect you hadn’t heard of Walk Talk Tours, the audio tours you download to your iPod or MP3 player. They are full of stories of famous (and infamous) residents who enrich a city’s history. We’ve got them in London, Edinburgh and York - and Manchester’s coming soon.

Ideal for a writer’s inspiration. Please check us out.

Denise A. Agnew

Denise A. Agnew

It was fantastic. One of the most soulful adventures I’d ever been on. I met some wonderful people, Bermudans rock! And had a great time. I remember getting stranded on the beach in the evening during high tide and Portugese ManoWar covered the entire length of sand. We had to climb up the rock face to get out of there. And one of our party was so drunk she’d passed out. So we had to carry her. LOL

Good times!!

Denise, I’m envious as all get out of you–I wanna go on a dig! /wail

My scariest experience is actually very tame. First and only time in Europe (ten years ago, where’s the time gone? We land at Frankfort Airport and I take the train to Koblenz (for a 4-week summer German class).

I have no German to speak off, and my English is quite shaky still, but I’m confident I can do this. Hello, I’ve lived in four countries! I speak *coughsortacough* four languages!

I get on the train, dragging two huge pieces of luggage with me. I sit there listening intently to the loudspeakers–all German all the time, nacht–while the train stops for two minutes (to the second, people, this is Germany) at each station. What seems like minutes later, we are in Switzerland.

Traveling on a Mexican passport, I don’t even know if I need a visa to enter the country, and I have literally no cash on me, and it’s Sunday, and…

By the time I get off the train, I don’t remember my name, and I can’t any other language but fast paced panicked Mexican Spanish.

Thankfully, the guys at the station on the border seem to see this same thing happen to summer students from the US all the time. They just patted my shoulder, and kindly led me to train leaving back to Germany.

Yeah, I still feel like a total idiot over it

Denise A. Agnew

I was in training for the US Army and we were rappelling. My Drill Sergeant called me up to the front of the line, past a good half dozen other soldiers, and started adjusting my swami harness in a way I’d never seen before. “You’re going to go Aussie style. You good with that?”

“What’s Aussie style, Drill Sergeant?”

“Face first.”

Gulp. There was just something in the way he presented it, like of course I was going to go face first off a 50 foot tower. No problem.

I did it. My form was awful, I got a horrible rope burn, and my legs were so rubbery afterwards I could hardly stand up. But it was a thrill on so many levels. I was the only female to do it, and only two guys (out of about 150) got up the courage.

Denise A. Agnew

Stacey